I had a few minutes yesterday to work on the curtain situation that was going on in our guest room. The new Ikea drapes were taking over the entire room and it was time to stand up and put an end to it.

Ok, so they weren’t taking over the entire room…but they were too long, and since I had a few minutes, (actually about an hour and a half) I got to work raising them up about 11 inches.

(I told you they were way too long.)

Now, I used pretty much the same technique here as I did when I cut our living room curtains into two panels, giving us four for the price of two. (Here’s the post on that if you want to go back and reread it.)

I started by measuring the curtains while they were hanging, in order to make sure they ended up the exact length we wanted.

For us, the magic number was 88 inches, which would give me about an inch to hem it and let it just barely touch the floor.

I spread the curtains out on the living room floor and measured down 88 inches from the top in three different places, marking it with a pencil.

I tried to keep the curtains as smooth and even as possible, but it was pretty hard to tell if the curtain was sewed uneven, or just crooked on the floor.

Luckily, curtains are pretty forgiving since they hang in folds, and on two sides of the window. Still, I tried to be as careful as possible, measuring each place three times, from the top and the bottom, then eyeballing it to make the line as straight as possible, using a straight edge (large level) to trace the line where I needed to cut.

You can tell the curtains really were uneven by how they look when I laid them on top of each other:

Anyway, after I got them cut, I used the iron-on tape to rehem them. It’s way easier to do this if you pre-press the seam where it needs to fold over.

Then, just carefully iron the hem.

On the corners, it didn’t end up exactly perfect, so I used a tiny piece of the hem tape to fold the corner over a second time so it didn’t show from the front side.

Then it was time to rehang them.

We think it’s a pretty big improvement.

And really, it was a pretty easy and cheap fix, considered I already had the hem tape and the iron, and it only took a little over and hour to have custom curtains for ten bucks. Totally worth it.

How high, or low, do you like to hang your curtains? Ever taken scissors to a pair of drapes that was just too long? I’d love to hear about it!