Upcycling scrap fabric for closet portière
Now that our home office is set up, I wanted to hide all the crap that we moved into our closet. I figured the easiest thing to do was to sew a curtain, but didn’t want to buy new fabric, so I gathered up some scrap fabric from old projects and set out to work.
How I made it
The first step was to choose fabric with colors that sort of matched. For me, most of my projects involve a mix of blue, green, and yellow, so I had lots to choose from.
I measured the width of the closet and multiplied it by 1.5 to give the portière a gathering effect that makes it easier to cover the entire space, and measured the height of the closet plus a few inches for the hanging loop.
Then on the fabric, I cut any funny edges so that each scrap was rectangular, and laid out the scraps on the floor to roughly fit the width of my measurement and added more scrap fabric pieces in areas where the mismatched fabrics didn’t align.
Took each scrap bit by bit and sewed them right sides together with any zig zag stitch–I used the shell tuck stitch–on your sewing machine. It took a little while to get all the pieces sewn up, but once that’s done, you’re almost there! The scrap fabric ‘quilt’ should roughly fit the dimensions of the closet frame.
I left my edges raw, but if you want to have clean edges, fold the edges twice with a half inch seam and sew along the entire curtain.
Next, I folded the top of the nearly completed portière twice and sewed a two inch seam to allow space for the string that would be looped through to hang.
My fiancé screwed two nails inside the closet on either side of the frame, then we looped our string and tied it up real tight.
And voilà–the portière is complete!
It definitely gives me country homemaker vibes, but the color and prints of the fabrics are bold, and overall, does the job of hiding our crap in the closet!
Glad to get finally make use of some scraps I’ve been hoarding for far too long. I hope you enjoyed this badly written tutorial hahah, and have a wonderful day or night, wherever in the world you are!
