Window dressing time

I’ve got another little camper remodel project for you today: camper window curtains. This little job was well overdue. Ever since our first trip in our camper, we had discovered a design flaw in the bunkhouse: metal window blinds. The blinds are problematic for two reasons. 1) Little hands bend the blinds every time kiddos try to peer outside–and the blinds never bend back flat again. 2) As kiddos roll around in their sleep at night they often crash into the blinds, making enough noise to wake themselves, a sibling, or even an already sleep-deprived parent. So it was high time for the blinds to go.

For this project I raided the clearance fabric bin at Hobby Lobby and found some fabric that coordinated well with the camper bunk curtains I made earlier. I wanted a dark color to help block out light for when the kiddos are taking naps. I could have lined the curtains, too, but that would have made this project more time-consuming, and more expensive, so I kept things simple.

We measured the windows so I knew how big to make each panel. So that the curtains wouldn’t just be flat but have a bit of ruffling, I decided to add in a few more inches of fabric to the width. I also added an additional 2.5″ to the length to cover the seam allowances and the pocket for the curtain rod. In other words: Our upper bunk windows were 31.5″ wide and 17.5″ tall. Since the material was already 40″ across I left that side alone and then just had to cut the fabric every 20″, for four windows. (The lower bunk window is a little bit taller, so I had to add 5″, but the width was the same.)

Next I sewed all the edges creating a 1/4″ seam. For the sides and bottom I then folded the seams another 1/4″ and sewed them again so there were no raw edges. For the top seam I folded it over 1″, and then stitched near the bottom of the fold to create a pocket for the curtain rod to later slide through:

When we took the blinds down, we left the wall mounting hardware on the camper walls because we had found cheap swivel end sash rods at Walmart. (I think they were about $2.50 each.) The rods can expand or shrink to fit certain lengths, and the ends had little holes that fit perfectly over our blind hardware. (The rods also came with mounting hardware, so if you don’t have existing wall hardware like we did, you could just use the included hardware.)

From there it was just a simple matter to slide the fabric on the rods and secure the rods on the wall hardware:

Once I had all of the curtains on the windows it was too dark for me to take a good picture (and our camper battery wasn’t charged so the overhead lights weren’t working). So I took a picture from the main part of the camper to show how well (even in the middle of the day) the curtains will do at blocking most daylight. (Things were a bit tight because the slide out is currently in right now.)

So now I just have one more project to tackle: modifying twin sheet sets to better fit the camper bunks. Stay tuned!