Hang Your Curtains Perfectly Straight Every Time With This Genius Penny Hack

If you are not into playing it safe with your design choices you may have purchased some funky but cheap curtains for your home. But, once you get them home and installed around your windows, you notice that they hang a little funny. Less expensive curtains like these are, thankfully, easy on the budget and might tick all the boxes that are important to your aesthetic, such as the perfect length, color, and quirkiness level, but they can somehow look a bit awkward and uneven. Fortunately, this can be easily remedied by taking a few minutes to weigh your curtains down by inserting pennies into the hems. 

Inserting pennies will help them hang straight and look less tentative, and yet no one will be the wiser. Sometimes, more budget-friendly curtains don't behave well for a couple of reasons. For one thing, less expensive curtains are often unlined, reducing their overall weight. Beyond that, they are usually constructed from a lighter fabric. If your curtains are sheer, a polyester blend, or cotton or linen and unlined, then they're especially lightweight and will swirl dramatically at even the lightest of breezes. Or they'll protrude in odd places, and if they're pleated, they can look sloppy at both the top and bottom of the panel.

A good first step to get curtains to hang properly is to iron out all the creases. If your fabric is finished but unhemmed, you can hem your curtains without sewing them to save time. Then, all you need is literally 24 cents to make this hack work — insert from four to six pennies into both ends of the curtain hem for each of the two panels. Glue the hems shut with fabric glue, and let the glue set for at least a day. To assist with adhesion, you can pin or safety pin the hem after gluing.

There are a couple of ways you can customize this hack. You can sew the sides of the hem shut to secure the pennies. Alternatively, there are products available for purchase that are called 'penny weights' meant expressly for weighting your curtains. They have holes like buttons that allow you to sew them directly onto the fabric. However, we won't recommend these because they are often made from lead. Even if coated with plastic or some other substance, you don't want lead in your house because of its health impacts. We prefer this hack because copper pennies are much safer.