Making Curtains - A learning experience - 1 March 2024

Here's an update about the curtain making experience.

You may remember that I had to put another bit of fabric to try and lift the curtain so the top section of the curtain did not flop.

It was not really successful. Have a look.

In fact the top of the curtain sagged even more. It's really not hard to see what is happening : the actual fabric is floppy, ie there's no stiffening in the top section of the curtain. Besides that the blackout lining makes the fabric a bit heavy so the curtain top flops even more. The only possible solution I could think of at the time was to forget about the whole 'hanging with clips' option and to go for a completely different method.

The new method I envisaged was using eyelets, rings, grommets or whatever name they have - I will use the term eyelets here. This was not my first option because I'd seen that you need special equipment to 'hammer' the grommets into place. Since looking into this method again I have been watching quite a number of YouTube tutorials on how to install plastic eyelets and eventually ordered some. This tutorial was very comprehensive and explained some of the calculations required to know where to put the eyelets and how to space them properly.

These plastic eyelets do not require the special equipment I'd seen online and, at least in the tutorials I've seen, the process looks relatively easy to follow.

This presentation was also extremely useful as it even shows a table with the recommended number of eyelets depending on the width of the curtain. I'm always grateful that I'm able to find this sort of information quite easily. Many people I know have told me to just go and buy 'ready made' curtains. I find making them myself has led me to even revisit some maths calculations. Buying 'ready made' will not be that creative and I'll have to find curtains that will 'hopefully' fit the size I need.

I'm currently measuring the fabric again to distribute 8 of these eyelets on the fabric. I'll be posting another update soon.

Thank you for reading.

( The two photos are mine )