How to make shower curtains into regular curtains

Here's my quick version of what I did to make my curtains. First, I started out with 12 shower curtains. I bought them at DownEast for $10 each. It was a fantastic sale and they originally are from West Elm. I bought 3 panels per window, and I have 4 windows, so hence 12 shower curtains.

The iron became my best friend in this project, or maybe it was my worst enemy because I ironed for HOURS! Seriously. They had been folded in the packaging for who knows how long, so it took forever to get all of the wrinkles out.

I started out pressing each one.

I needed my curtains to be about 100 inches in length. They came at about 70 inches. So what I did was I took the extra curtain that I had for each window and cut out 2 stripes with extra seam allowance. you can see in this pictures that there is a seam at the top between the white and yellow stripes and again between the bottom 2 stripes. I cut out two of those from each curtain.

I cut the panels at the bottom and inserted the new piece, then sewed the curtain all back together and then I finished the seam off in a zig zag. If I had a serger it would have made life easier, but I didn't. So I zig zagged.

You can see better here my zig zag stitch on the seam on the back of the curtain. Then I unpicked the bottom hem of the curtain panel, ironed it out, and then folded under about 1/4 inch and then sewed it. Because I needed all the length I could get, I wasn't able to turn it over again to cover the unfinished seam.

So what I did next was I bought some matching ribbon, we found it at Hobby Lobby (my mom and I), and sewed that to give it weight at the bottom as well as to keep all those threads from fraying since the seam wasn't covered.

Once they were up to this point I took them to the dry cleaner and had them pressed. They were still wrinkled even after all the ironing I did.

Then I trained my curtains. I tied them off using the excess ribbon that was left over from the bottom of the curtains. I left them like this for 2 1/2 days. Impressive I was that patient at this point!! Training them makes them stay folded or pleated how you want them so they hang nicely.

This isn't the best picture, but it works for the finished product. I actually still have some weights that I bought to sew onto each corner of the curtains so they are weighted down a bit more. I've just been doing other things that are more fun :)

And there you have it! They took a long time, but they were worth it. Curtains can be so expensive! You can find panels for around $50 and up. So I figured paying about $30-$35 per window wasn't too bad.  It was definitely work, but I am really happy with how they turned out.