Table Runner

Do you remember this piece of fabric?  

I picked it up from the clearance bin and had no idea what to do with it so I asked for ideas.  Yvonne from Style Burb had suggested a table runner and that sounded like a good idea to me.  I knew that our kitchen table needed a little something and hoped that my rudimentary sewing skills would be able to handle a few hems.



Obviously, this table runner was super easy.  The hardest part was cutting straight and I'm not even kidding.  You know how when you first start doing something you don't have all the time-saving tools because you aren't sure you're going to like it or keep with it?  Well that's where I'm at with sewing.  It would be awesome to have a rotary cutter and self-healing mat and maybe some tool to help me draw a straight line.

I don't have any of those things so I just kept measuring, measuring, measuring to make sure I was pretty much straight.  Talk about rudimentary skills, I drew along the wrong side of the fabric with a ballpoint pen (at least I was bright enough to get the right side of the fabric, well the wrong side, well you know what I mean).

I cut an 18-inch wide piece of fabric because my plan was to do a 1-inch seam on each side, and I wanted the runner to be 16 inches wide at the end.  I didn't measure the length because the bought-on-a-whim-with-no-intended-purpose-fabric was not quite as long as I would have preferred for the runner.  It looked like it would still work, but I didn't want to shorten it any more so I didn't trim anything off.

I started with the long sides and turned up each edge by 1/2-inch, pinned it, and then pressed it. Then I went back and turned each edge up another 1/2-inch to prevent unravelling, pinned, and then pressed again.

It's so funny what trips you up when you're a newbie at something.  The first time I tried to sew this I had the pins the wrong way.  I didn't realize there WAS a right way to put the pins but when the ball heads kept getting caught up in the sewing machine foot I figured it out quickly.  The picture above shows the right way so that the ball head is with the extra fabric which for me stays to the left, outside of jamming range.

About 10 inches into sewing the first side, the needle hit a pin, bent it up and jammed the sewing machine (temporarily thank goodness).  Was this another lesson?  I'm not sure but I did remove all of the pins right before they got to the foot so that it wouldn't happen again.  Then I googled when to remove your pins and found myself in the middle of a major debate.  I guess you could go either way but after that twisted needle, I decided to fall on the side of not sewing over pins.

So four hems later, here is our new kitchen table runner.  The fabric colours pick up the black of the chairs and the gold in the paint so it matched perfectly.

It really does make a huge difference which kind of surprised me.  This corner feels a lot fresher.  Someone agrees.

This is Moe.  He got up here so quickly that it was all I could do to snap a few pictures without him on the table.  If you look at the above picture you can even see him getting ready to make his move (top left corner).


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