This Place is a Prison

One of my FAVORITE things about my little living space is the striped curtains (my family thinks everything I love looks like prison). I've been eying them for a long time but could never shell out mucho bucks to buy any. 

So I made some. I followed a tutorial on a blog somewhere, but it was so long ago that I have NO IDEA where it came from. Good thing I made my own. ;)

First, I bought these fancy shmancy curtains from Target for $13 a panel. They are black (contrary to the photo that looks like they're white - that's a piece of cardboard).

Fair warning: Painting black curtains with white paint = more coats, but if you already have white paint like me, then why buy dark paint if you can just use some of the ridiculous amounts of white you already have? Good idea, no?

Also buy a foam roller brush (they're like $4 at Wal-Mart) and some wide painter's tape.

 I wanted about foot thick stripes, so I divided my 84" curtain length by 12 and came out with 7, which was good because I wanted a black stripe on top AND bottom of my curtains (odd number of stripes = same color on top and bottom, even number of stripes = different colors on top and bottom).

Being a math nerd, I used a square to measure out my stripes. I measured down from the top in a few spots across the curtain, then taped my line of tape along the markers. I did the same thing down the curtain.

The tricky thing is: You need to include the tape in your measurements sometimes. In the left picture, I have measured from the top edge of the tape, and in the right picture, I keep the tape on the inside of the markers. This keeps my stripes equidistant.

Did that make sense? I made this little diagram to explain what I'm saying. You want to make sure that the area you're painting is 12 inches between the tape. This will make the unpainted areas look smaller because the tape is in it - I exaggerated it in the illustration.

I threw in some x's on the spaces I was not painting since I can be a little air-headed at times. Then I painted. One coat was not enough so I threw on coat #2. And I was sure to peel off the tape while the paint was wet to prevent any chipping.

I lined up the curtains side by side and made markers where the new tape should be so that they would line up in the middle. Then I taped the wide stripes and did the whole process again.

Afterwards, there were little drippy spots, which I fixed with a black sharpie. ;)

 

The curtains were stiff when done (and are still a little stiff), but they have softened up as they have hung.

Then you sit back and admire them and dream about marrying them and making little striped curtain babies.