DIY Custom Pleated Curtains

I searched for hours and hours to find floral pleated curtains, in a print I loved, that were also long enough for our 10 foot ceilings with no luck! I finally decided to purchase fabric and make my own for Squish’s room. Shop the fabric I used HERE!

I do have a background in sewing but if you know how to use a sewing machine at all, this will be pretty easy to follow along.

I have made my own curtains before and I usually prefer to leave the edges of the fabric alone

So all that leave is cutting the fabric to length and hemming the top and bottom! But in this case, I chose to sew in pleating tape to give them a more custom look, rather than just hanging the fabric through a loop of fabric or with curtain hooks.

How To:

I was able to find pleating tape on amazon! Once it arrived I realized that it is actually from Ikea, so if you have a store nearby you might can grab some there.

We already have our curtain rods hung which made measuring for length fairly easy. I needed about 117″ in length for my curtains to hit the floor so I made sure to add about 4 inches to that before cutting my fabric. This would account for where I would hem the panels at the top and the bottom.

If you saw on my instagram stories, when my fabric came in the mail it was much brighter than it was pictured online. I decided not to return it but instead us the back of the fabric for a more muted look.

At the top of each panel, I folded back and pinned about 1 inch for a hem.

I pressed this fold with an iron.

Before sewing this seem I placed the pleating tape on top of the fold and pinned in place.

I sewed a seam on top and bottom of the pleating table to hold it securely.

This was so easy to do! The only issue I ran into is that I planned to use the little hoops on the back of the pleating tape to hang the curtains, rather than using pleating hooks. So I had to cut extra pieces of the pleating tape and sew them on the ends to make sure I had hoops at the edges of my curtain panel.