How to Make Your Own DIY Shower Curtain

I come from a long family of crafty women.  My mother painted sweatshirts for my sister and I in the 80s.  My grandmother made dolls that looked much like the original Cabbage Patch Kids.  My great, great grandmother made beautiful quilts that I still cherish today.

Even though I grew up creative, I never wanted to learn to sew.  Then when my son was born and I couldn’t find much clothing for him that wasn’t covered in sports themes, I tricked myself into learning how to sew.

And even though I taught myself to sew, I never wanted to learn to quilt.  It seemed too tedious and precise.  But then when I couldn’t find a really great shower curtain for my epic kids’ bathroom, I ended up tricking myself into learning how to quilt, too.

I’m a sucker.

I had absolutely no idea how to make a shower curtain, or a pieced quilt, but I just sat down and decided to do it.  I felt like playing chess, trying to see two or three steps beyond my current position.  Believe it or not, it all eventually worked out without a major amount of seam ripping going on.  Folks, I consider that a major win!

I didn’t take pictures along the way because I didn’t want to turn this into a tutorial since I didn’t really know what I was doing.  But because so many of you have asked for one, I’ll give you the basic idea of how I made the magic happen.

1.  I bought two two polyester, extra-long shower curtains from Amazon.com (affiliate link).  Mine are 96 inches long, since I wanted to raise make the shower curtain as high as possible for my tall ceilings.  I chose this particular curtain because I wanted it to be waterproof yet not feel like plastic.  I also wanted to be able to wash it in the washing machine if needed.  I used one as a liner and the other as a base for the shower curtain I was sewing.

2. I ordered fabric for the curtain from a local store that has a big online presence – Fat Quarter Shop.  I knew from my previous sewing experiences that I wanted to order Robert Kaufman’s line of Kona cotton.  That fabric is easy to sew with and washes/presses beautifully.  I chose 6 colors – Camilla, Cadet, Corn Yellow, Iron, White and Black – and ordered 2 yards of each color.

3.  When the fabric arrived, I washed and pressed it.

4.  Then, I spent a ridiculous amount of time cutting it into triangles.  I found this blog post that showed how to make an isosceles triangle quilt, and I used that as a guide on piecing it together.  I used the suggested Quilt Sense Kaleidoscope Triangle Ruler (affiliate link), which made it really easy to cut my triangles out with a rotary cutter.  It wasn’t difficult to do – just time consuming.

5.  After the triangles were all cut out, I started sewing them together in a random order with a 1/4 inch seam allowance.  I sewed them together in rows and then went back and sewed the rows together to be slightly larger on all four sides than the shower curtain.  I literally laid the shower curtain out on the floor and laid rows out on top to know how many I would need.  I think I ended up with 17 rows of 30 triangles – which was about 500 total triangles.

6.  After the triangles were assembled, I used my double ironing board technique to press open the seams on the back.

7.  I laid the polyester shower curtain down on a flat surface and laid the triangles out on top of it.  Making sure that the triangle pattern was even and smooth, I pinned the triangles to the shower curtain every few inches around the edges  I also put some pins across some of the rows so that it wouldn’t bunch in the middle.

8.  With invisible thread in my machine and white thread in my bobbin, I sewed across the rows.  This effectively “quilts” the triangle top to the shower curtain backing.  I sewed across every row about 1/8 of an inch from the bottom of the row.

Here’s how that looks from the back:

9.  Then, I sewed around the edges of the curtain and cut off any extra triangle fabric that was hanging over the edges.

10.  I bought wide black double-fold bias tape to finish the edges.  There are a lot of different ways to finish edges with bias tape, but I just sewed mine on in the easiest way possible – like the “cheater” method at the end of this post.

11.  Whew!  Almost finished.  I just used my sewing machine to make button holes on the top of the shower curtain so I would have a place to put the hooks.  If you don’t have a button holer on your machine, you can always use grommets like Beckie did here.

I hung it up and used the 2nd shower curtain I ordered as a liner.  It’s been in place for about a month now and is holding up perfectly.  I’m so proud of it!

That was a lot of sewing, but I think it’s well worth it.  I just love this shower curtain about eleventy billion times more than anything else I’ve ever seen in stores.

Questions?  Definitely let me know!  And thank you so much for taking a look!