Cheap curtain material

Ebay is good for large quantities of curtain material, mishap. There are rolls of fabric that you can buy at nominal prices, or lots of examples of materials for £3.99 a metre, and the quality is fine.

My son and fiancée recently bought matching curtains for the whole house in the Boundary Mill sale. The ones they got were Rectella - lined, beautiful fabric, original cost for floor length drapes were £200 a pair, knocked down to £67, then a further 10% off at the checkout and they got five pairs for about £280. They had tab tops but one set were for a track, so I cut the tab tops off, sewed Ruflette on and made two pairs of tie backs for their downstairs curtains. There were plenty of unlined curtains at a fraction of the price, too, and you can get bargains all year round. When we checked the cost of having the same curtains made, they would have been £1,500.

If you buy fabric off Ebay, you can get tracks, hooks and Ruflette very cheap on there, too.

My daughter had to make curtains on a very tight budget and some of them had to be floor length. Her solution was to by cheap plain fabric but add a deep border to the bottom of the curtain in something more bold and stylish and to use left overs to make to a few large scale patchwork cushion covers. Ikea sells modern bold designs and a little goes a long way when used in this fashion. P.S. the result looks amazing!

Abakhan in Flint, North Wales sell fabric by the weight quite cheaply...off cuts and ends of rolls, they sell online too, thousands of designs.

Lots of thank for all these brilliant ideas - I will get on the case. One problem is that the DD in question is notoriously bad at making decisions!

Oxfam & other charity shops usually have lots of curtains.

IKEA have some new designs and the last time I looked their fabric was great quality for about £5 a metre. They also do ready made and the plain floor length ones are not expensive. If they are not too far away from a store a trip there may be worth it.

The cheapest curtains I ever had came from wilkinsons or wilko as it is now called, I got cheap ones for my kitchen for £12.00, however they were thin but washed well and I had them for about three years. If you need several pairs these would be ok, until something better. Apart form this I would go to charity shops but don't forget to examine them closely for fading or damage.

Any curtains will look better if you add cheap linings to the back.

Paul Simon is closing down apparently, email this morning. They have branches in several towns.

Quite often women's magazines have adverts for furnishing fabric wholesalers.

DD took me to a huge emporium in north London called Fabric Warehouse or something. Many of their fabrics were between £5 - £10 a metre. Most areas seem to have shops with names like Fabric Factory, Fabric Warehouse, Fabrics Galore etc. Try googling your area and curtain fabrics'. Make sure any curtain fabric you buy is cotton and washable. It costs another mortgage to dry clean curtains.

A friend found the ideal fabric locally for her curtains but it was far too expensive. She got the details in the shop, name, design etc etc and googled it. And got it on line for less than half the store price

It might be worth going online. Most reputable companies will send free samples.

I have looked online and there is no way of telling the texture of the material, but the idea of looking "in the flesh" and then going online makes huge sense. And it is good to know that free samples an be sent.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Go with Mishap's suggestion. I saw what I thought I liked on line. Good pattern and colour. Free sample showed the fabric and texture were not acceptable, but for the price of a stamp it was well worth a try. Not sure what you regard as expensive but I bought lots of curtain ( 12 lengths at 106'' drop and adjusted to fit for free) for less than £400 from Elmet.

Make roman blinds..not too tricky and take much less fabric and less 'space' in a room. I have them all over and have thermal lined some at single glazed windows and blackout lining on the bedrooms!

Some outdoor markets have fabric stalls with reasonable prices. I think Home Bargains sell curtains.

Charity shops often sell duvet covers quite cheaply. They'd make acceptable curtains as a temporary measure until they could afford proper curtain material.

Mishap are you in London area?