DIY Striped Burlap Curtains

I've been trying to decide on curtains for our living room for awhile.  I loved the big striped curtains I saw all over pinterest.  I wanted the striped look on burlap to get the natural beachy feel I was going for for the living room. 

Some great things I discovered about working with burlap.. a.) It's super cheap, b.) It is very easy to cut a straight line with since the whole thing is like one big grid.  

The width of the burlap straight from the bolt at the fabric store was perfect for each panel so i just had to measure how tall I wanted them.  I got them cut at the store but they were not cut straight so I had to re-cut the bottoms and tops.  

To make cutting a straight line super quick and easy just remove a strand of burlap in the direction you would like to cut and it leaves you a perfect line of where to cut.  

After cutting I added fray check to the edges to ensure it wouldn't unravel...  which I later discovered was unnecessary if you will be painting the edges the paint will do the same job and you can skip that step.

Then you have to make your measurements and decide on how many stripes, do a little math and come up with how wide each stripe should be.  I marked mine with pins so that I could get a straight line (again following the grid of the fabric).

Then I put painters tape down and took out the pins.

I started out using craft paint mixed with Martha Stewart's fabric medium to make it into fabric paint but quickly realized that would get SUPER expensive (I went through $40 worth of paint to do one stripe!) to get the paint coverage I was looking for.  The burlap sucked up the paint and the fabric medium made it runnier and then it offered less coverage.  It looked really patchy until I did about 20 coats of paint!

I ended up switching over to Glidden Gripper and Primer that I had left over from my coffee table project.  This paint gave me a LOT better coverage and I wasn't going to be snuggling up with this fabric so I didn't mind if it made the fabric stiff.

After several coats I peeled off the painters tape and reveled at my beautiful stripes!
I decided to hang mine with cafe clips and it was super easy and I could just mold the top of the painted burlap to stand just how I wanted it.

I wanted the curtain panels to have a nice uniform wave to it, so I clipped them up with pool noodles under the waves and left the clips in place for about a day to give them their shape.

I love how adding curtains makes such a dramatic difference to the look and feel of a room.

Before curtains

After curtains