How to Lengthen Curtains that are too short

When I started the refresh in our basement bedroom, I already had a set of curtains on the wall that was from another house but they were too short for this room. I had hung them up previously because we just had a friend renting the room and we needed something asap for blocking out the light. When my sister asked to move in, I wanted to make the room a bit nicer for her. To stick to our super low budget I decided to work with the curtains I had and add another panel to the bottom, to give them a color-blocking effect.

My mom is a seamstress in her spare time so I looked through her fabric and found a black drapery fabric that would go well with the curtains.

Then I measured the floor to ceiling length to find the length I wanted the curtains to be. The black fabric I found was just a couple meters so after measuring it, I cut off a few inches from the curtains so the two pieces together would make the right length.

Since I had my mom’s help we decided to sew on the extra panel, but this could easily be done with an iron-on strip to hold them together.

Here are the curtains after adding the panel! So much better! And basically a free DIY since we had the fabric on hand. But if you were to buy an extra panel it would still only be about $10-$20 depending on your fabric. Still much cheaper than new curtains!

We kept it simple and just serged the two pieces together, then, we serged the bottom and then we turned over and sewed a bottom and side hem to finish them off.