DIY Block Print Drapery

The past few months I’ve been slowly bringing a little more color and pattern into our house but crossing over from the world of all-white-everything can be intimidating! I want to add interest and depth to each room in our house without losing the bright and light feeling it has when you walk from room to room. So I’m trying it in bits and pieces – first the TV den, and now our dining room. I decided that I really love the traditional layout of our house and want to capitalize on that, so when you are standing in one room looking into the next, each doorway is framing the room beyond with a contrast of color or style.

I always love the look of patterned drapery, but it is a big investment for something that already felt risky to me. We have these IKEA Ritva curtain panels in every room of our house, so I decided instead of having new drapes made that I would use our existing curtains as backing and sew new fabric right onto them.

I definitely don’t consider myself a seamstress so if you need detailed instructions on how to sew, I would take to YouTube and see what you can find that’s helpful. What I did: cut the new fabric to the length of my IKEA panels + 4″ or so (they were already hemmed to the right length), cut the IKEA panels down to the with of the new fabric, finished all of the cut edges and then pinned + sewed the new fabric right onto the IKEA panels. Super easy!

I’m a sucker for a good block print fabric, so I ended up going with a hand blocked printed fabric that I ordered from Etsy. It took awhile for the seller to get it just right (I highly recommend asking for photos before the fabric goes in the mail) but in the end I was really happy with the way it turned out.

I thought that brass paired really well with this fabric so I ordered new rods and rings to hang them by. I think the combination of the two is so pretty!

I still am planning on painting these walls a beige/greige/linen color (more on that later) and I might re-home this light to the kids room that I’m also scheming over. We’ll see! I love this process of playing with new colors, patterns, ideas and design elements. Keeps things fresh and pushes me out of my comfort zone a bit.