No sew DIY blackout drapes

We’ve had blackout drapes in the past. Will used to work the midnight shift once every few weeks, so they were kind of a necessity. Our bedroom has an east window, so it’s like the sun is actually in your room every morning. This is actually great for me, since I’m a sunshine waker, but not great for him and definitely not great when working midnights and trying to sleep during the day. I bought a set of blackout drapes for the bedroom then, and was surprised by how pricey they were.

We took the blackout drapes down a while back when I switched to shorter curtains in the bedroom. I could have cut off the blackouts and kept them in there, but they were so expensive that I didn’t want to cut them if we ever put the longer curtains back (the stuff is thick enough that it’s be obvious if they didn’t go all the way down). So we’ve done without.

Well now, we have a super bright baby’s room to worry about. And at 3 months (and getting too big for her bassinet by the second) she’s sleeping in her crib now, and we’re working on “sleep teaching” with the book pictured over to the right. She doesn’t have too much trouble falling asleep, but she often wakes up more during the night than I’d like (still not a big deal to feed her and gt back to sleep, but after 3 months of that, plus another month or two of crap end-of pregnancy sleep, it’s taking its toll on my sanity since Will can’t help (breastfeeding)). So anyway. Among other things, that book recommends that you make the baby’s room as dark as possible. Which it clearly wasn’t. They suggest black trashbags and the like, but this is not a DIY that suggest using trash bags for blackout drapes. Don’t worry.

I figured if I was doing her room (which only has the one window), it’d be a good time to also do our room again, and also get some sort of lining (not blackout) for the office curtains I made, so they looked cleaner from outside the house (you can kind of see the pattern from outside now, and much to my mother’s chagrin, we don’t have blinds or shades). Well, wouldn’t you know it, Roc-Lon blackout fabric was on sale at Fabric.com!

TIME OUT. So I recently finally signed on at ebates.com and ohmygodwhydidinotdothissooner?! They have SO many stores on there and I already got a $10 target gift card in the mail! Seriously! If you do ANY shopping online, it’s worth it to sign up for an account. And if you do, please use my link below! Obv I get props…so thanks.

OK so anyway – the fabric is also available from Amazon, as linked above, but I got it direct from fabric.com because it happened to be cheaper there that day. I bought the shoter size, but they also have the longer length and it’s only a couple dollars more a yard. (For the office, I just bought drapery liner, which is basically just slightly heavier muslin.)

I knew from having made curtains before, that for my windows I need 1 yard per panel (as long as it’s 54in+ width fabric – the width becomes the length of your curtains and vice-versa). So I ordered accordingly. If you remember to ask in a comment box online or are buying from the store, just ask them to cut in 1 yard sections to save some time. I forgot to do that, but just used one of my many yards of fabric from the photo project to measure and cut. Just make sure you have the fabric turned the right way so you’re cutting by the yard and not by the 50-whatever inches. The fabric is kind of plasticy, so you don’t need to worry about hemming, and you can actually just slide a fairly sharp pair of scissors down (rather than…scissoring?) to get a clean line.

From here, it depends on what kind of curtains you have how to hang them. I bought some curtain clips and used those, but also ended up just safety pinning to the top back of the curtains (you can hide the pins in the curtain’s top hem) to hold things there better. Not too shabby, eh?

So rather than like $30/window, I only spent under $10/window to get blackout drapes! There’s not even any sewing involved!

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