Curtains!

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Hi

We're going to need to replace the internal curtains on our boat as the current ones are beginning to show their age.

We probably don’t need a company to make them for us as we can get this done ourselves but we were wondering if there’s a recommended type of material that we should be looking for – assuming that we should look for a level of sun protection and possible black out.

If anybody's got any advice that they'd be willing to share then we'd really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.
 
When making curtains for boats I've always used offcuts from the upholstery material used to cover the cushions. I've either made a tunnel seam on the top edge and used the spring wire stuff usually used for net curtains or simple rufflet tape and curtain hooks where there was a rail fitted to the boat. The material then matches the upholstery, fades are about the same rate and stays looking reasonable. Never bothered to start thinking about anything special for curtains.
That won't work, of course, if you've got pvc upholstery. Then I'd simply go to your local sewing store and buy a reasonably heavy material that tones with your existing upholstery (plain rather than patterned to avoid any problems getting the pattern to match). For most boats you aren't going to be looking for more than a couple of metres, so easy enough to do and cheap as chips.
 
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I prefer lightweight material, though the light-excluding properties won't be so good. It would be nice if there were such a thing as mould-resistent cloth.
 
johnalison said:
I prefer lightweight material, though the light-excluding properties won't be so good. It would be nice if there were such a thing as mould-resistent cloth.
Click to expand...

Sunbrella claim theirs is. We had curtains made in this last winter - really pleased with them, but haven't properly tested the mould claim yet as been onboard full time since May heading towards the Med.
 
slight drift but relevant, what do you do to prevent the curtains hanging away from the window when the window is sloping inwards, and letting the light in

David MH
 
IMG_1749.jpg

Ebay is a good source of material.

My windows slope - the front ones a lot, the side ones a bit. It took a while to work out how to address this. The side works work well just hanging a little way away from the frame. I found the track used for caravans worked well, teak for the rail to cover the track and the aluminium off stands (used for signs) look good.

The front I used the sign off stands with stainless rods as the rails top and bottom.
 
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Curtain material. I'd recommend lining your curtains. This means you have a wider choice of material, as you don't require anything fully opaque to keep the light out/in, but, perhaps more importantly, it's the lining that takes the brunt of the UV damage, and can be cheaply replaced (as we did recently on curtains that are probably decades old, but the interior coloured/patterned fabric was fine while the exterior plain white lining was getting ragged).

Keeping the curtain bottom in on sloping windows. Our previous boat had tracks at the top of the curtains, but none at the bottom (and here would have anyway detracted from the style. shape and finish of the boat's interior). Instead, the boat had lengths of old fashioned curtain wire (metal coil interior, plastic outer) just above the bottom of the curtains and stretched between small eyes screwed into the bulkheads at end end of each window. This was neat and unobtrusive, and kept the curtains in their place whether closed or open. I dimly recall that either the wires or the eye fittings (neither stainless) were showing some discolouring at one point, but were replaced at a cost of about £2 and 10 minutes work, and have been fine for years since.
 
Tracks top and bottom can be a problem if they are not absolutely parallel, so we used a track at the top and ‘holdback’ bars across the bottom, with just enough depth of curtain for it not to ‘pop out’ from behind the holdback.

One can find rather posh bars like these in brass https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1a/1d/0e/1a1d0e8107cd533eb92d8b419d18f396.jpg but I just used lengths of teak-stained 19mm D-beading screwed to the GRP liner with long self tappers through standoffs an inch or so long cut from ca. 1cm OD aluminium tube. A bit of a fiddle but not that tricky, and it has worked very well; curtain lining and adequate fullness deals with light.
 
Thank you. As you are thinking about it, I’ll add that with two windows each side of the saloon (32ft boat) I used a single length of D-beading per window, each supported by a standoff at each end and one right in the middle – fine with two curtains to each window, and having a standoff in the middle was enough to keep the holdback following closely enough the fore-and-aft curvature of the GRP lining. With careful positioning of their standoffs the two lengths on each side could be butted between the windows – as were the tracks above – so when closed, the curtains form an essentially continuous ‘wall’.
 
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