Friday Finishes

My quilted tablecloth is finished, and it is my first 2015 finish. I'm so pleased with how it turned out. I must admit to be wonderfully surprised and thrilled at how soft became after washing. It was pretty stiff feeling before but the bamboo batting really softened after the soak to remove my markings and a run through the washer.

Vintage linen collectors or hand-quilting purists may not be pleased with my finished project and that's okay. We all must do what brings us the most joy. I hand quilted using the big stitch method with Aurifil 12 weight thread in areas that were visible. The thicker thread really stands out perfectly, which is what I was going after. I also practiced my free motion stitching and machine stitched in areas that are not visible from the front but needed more quilting to hold the quilt together and keep the batting from shifting/separating from repeated use. I'm planning on loving/using this tablecloth for many, many years. It will become a December tradition to pull it out and grace the table with it. I may just have to extend that length of use through out January because it looks so pretty on the table.

I hope that seeing this project from the beginning to the end has encouraged you to breathe new life into one of your own favorite linens or rescue one from a antique shop. They are not difficult to find.

Additional photos are included below. Click on the photo to see a larger version.

In this first photo, you can see the border area I mentioned when I first started (bottom left corner). The manufacturer stamped the cloth just a bit off which made the cream border not as wide on that one end. To fix this, I would have had to cut down the border all the way around. I decided against doing that because I wanted to keep as much of the cream border as possible. I'm so glad I did because I stitched funky trees in it, and I just love how it looks.