McEntire House Makeover: Making 2 Shower Curtain Panels out of 1

Buying our first house made us suddenly realize how expensive everything is. Seriously EVERYTHING. Like light bulbs for example. We recently spent 45 big ones on 12 light bulbs. This is no joke. Don't get me wrong, we are fortunate to have recessed lighting throughout our house but holy smokes that's a lot for some light bulbs. And we even bought the cheapest ones! Don't get all judgy on me because we didn't buy the LED ones. Those were $25 each and we just could NOT justify dropping $200 on some light bulbs. The Lowe's guy was even there trying to talk us into the LED bulbs... 'But these will last you 20 years!'... Umm I will be SHOCKED if we stay in this house for even 10 years. And if we're gonna bite the bullet and replace our bulbs with LED ones, we're gonna do it one at a time. Not when we have to buy 12 at once. Sorry land fill, we'll make up for it in other ways.

Where was I? Oh yeah..everything is expensive. So in order to afford the must-have items like light bulbs, I'm having to get creative to stretch my small DIY project budget as far as possible. One way I stretched it last month was by making two shower curtain panels out of one. I love the look of 2 shower curtain panels layered with one regular sized curtain behind. I think it makes the bathroom look more finished and expensive and also adds some extra warmth to the room. After doing some research, I decided that I wanted the two outer panels to be regular fabric curtain panels. Shower curtains are often more plastic-y, and I like how thick and substantial normal window curtains are. I was browsing through Target and fell in love with these.

The only problem? They're $25 per panel. I didn't really want to spend $50 on some curtains on top of the regular shower curtain that would go behind it. Lucky for me, I had my thinking cap on. In Devin's words, I was 'using my thinker, not my stinker.' Since each panel was 84" wide, I figured if I cut one in half, I'd still have a nice sized panel to fit my needs. So that's what I did.

I laid out the curtain to see what I was working with. Amazingly, the Target curtain packing people (technical title) folded the curtain exactly in half before packaging it, leaving me with a perfect fold- aka cutting reference line- right in the center. It's like the curtain was just asking to be cut in half.

I clearly wasn't giving Bear enough attention while cutting the fabric. He let me know.

Next, I just used my handy dandy Heat n Bond Hem tape and ironed on a hem right along the side that I cut.

You can find more details on using hem tape here.

That's really all there was to it. I hung these panels on a separate curtain rod in front of our white shower curtain.