What do you need to know when measuring fabric for curtains?

So this may seem daunting but its a fairly easy process once your into it,measuring for curtains gets a little more tricky for arched windows and a few feature aspects of the curtain the person making up your curtains will help with anything unusual.

We are just using a straightforward curtain with an eyelet or pleated curtains for our examples today. So lets start with the pole or track it should be up and in place before measuring for the fabric, ideally the curtain pole needs to be 15 - 20 cm above your window and 15 - 20 cm past the window at either end.

Get your width measurement of the pole length not including the finials. Then have a think about how full you would like the curtains to look, this gathering is quite important and its always attractive to have a natural gathering across the curtains even when hey are closed so we would suggest doubling the length of your pole measurement to give you this fullness.

The next thing we need to look at is the length or the drop of the curtains, this again will vary depending on your personal choice of having the curtains to the floor, with a pool effect ( excess fabric pooled on the floor) or there are three standard choices, just above the windowsill 1 cm above, full length to the floor will end 1cm above the floor, or a mid length that is 15 cm below the windowsill.

Bear in mind a radiator it is recommended to have curtains finishing 2 to 3 cm above a radiator so that the heat from the radiator does not get trapped behind the curtains,

So for the drop measurement you will need to measure from the top of the pole to your chosen end point for eyelet curtains, for curtains hanging below a pole you measure from the eye of the hook beneath the pole to the end point. For tracks measure from the top of the track to the end point.

Don't forget to measure in two or three places as floors can be uneven so use the smallest measurement as your length.

Finally the next bit is choosing the fabric most are sold with a width of 137 cm but its extra important to look at the pattern repeat of the fabric if there is one, as this will be needed when you look at how long you need the fabric to be

So if we have a pole length of 228cm and we want a full gathered curtain we need to double that measurement to 456 cm then divide that by 137cm as the one width of fabric will not be enough to cover the window the fabric will need to be sewn together. so 456 divided by 137cm is 3.32 we round this up to the next whole number of 4.

We work out the length next with the pattern repeat so if the curtain drop is 213 cm we need to add 20cm to this to allow for hems and turning making it 233 cm

The next step ... take the drop including hems and divide it by the pattern repeat of the fabric for this example well use 64cm as the repeat making it 3.48 again round it up to a whole number on this example that will be 4 then times 4 by the pattern repeat of 64 is 256 cm tis final figure gives us the cut length.

The final step ... take the cut length of 256 cm and times it by the number of drops you need 4 we end up with 1024 or 10 metres and 24 cm again we round up to the next 10 cm so you can order 10.3 m of fabric.

Any questions do give us a call and well be happy to discuss and run through your project. 01792 414662 .