Design Dilemma
Earlier this week my twin sister Diane called me with a home decdesign dilemma.The small chest that satbetween two red leather chairs in her living room was so narrow thatpeople sitting in the chairs couldn’t see each other around the lampat the back of the chest.Hersolution was a clever one: she claimed a matching chest from another room and placed it back to back with the first one. Then she had apiece of glass made to fit the top.The only problem was that you could see under the glass where the two chests met in the middle.
Could she commission me to make atable runner to cover the middle section? Of course she could. She wanted something very simple — no piecing required, just a rectangle about 9″ wide and long enough toextend downboth sides of the chest.We talked about colors to match her living room –deep red, tan, forest green. I was ready to charge off to a fabric store to look at home dec fabrics.
Diane was incredulous. “Don’t you have some fabric in your stash that will work?” she asked. Well, of course I did. A little stash diving resulted in thisgroup of fabrics sent from Portland to Atlanta via iPhone for Diane’s inspection:
She liked theprint in the center of the photo — the one with the red flowers and vines on a tan background — and the red and tan toile on the right side. No need to choose between them. By making the table runner reversible, we could use both fabrics.
I pulled a red leaf print from my stash for the binding:
The only thing I needed to buy was topstitching thread. It hadto be just the right color to look good on bothfabrics, as thebackgrounds are similar but definitely not the same. In no time at allmy quiltsandwich was ready.I decided to quilt a diagonal 1″ grid across the surface of the table runner, using my walking foot and this light taupe rayon thread by Madeira that has abeautiful sheen:
I cut the binding stripson the bias,by the way,because I knew the leaf print would look better that way. Here is the runner quilted and ready to bind:
Notice that the table runner isn’t just a rectangle?It wouldn’t bemuch more work,I reasoned, to make the ends pointed, and it would be so much more elegant.It didn’t occur to me until later that I would have six corners to miterand that fourof those corners would be angles greaterthan 90 degrees.No worries, though. Heather Peterson of Anka’s Treasures has an excellent tutorial on her blog, Trends and Traditions, that shows how to bind outside corners greater than 90 degrees.
Once the binding was stitched on,I tacked it down on the other side using Steam-a-Seam 2, a double stick fusible webbing. At the top of the photo you can see how the webbing is positioned right along the folded edge of the binding:
(Steam-a-Seam 2 comes in ¼”-wide rolls. All I had on hand was ½”-wide.Easy enough to cut it in half to make¼”-wide strips.) The fusible webbing made short work of finishing the binding. All that was left was tacking down the mitered corners by hand.I was on the last miter when I noticedI had missed three rows of quilting:
Now doesn’t this look better?
Here is Diane’s reversibletable runner (measuring9-3/8″ x 41″), ready to be boxed and mailed:
This little project was a pleasantdiversion from binding Toile Story. I do enjoy binding quilts by hand but was ready for a little break.Dianesaid she wasn’t in a hurry to receive this butwas hoping to get it before she hosts a cocktail partylater this month.She’ll be very surprised to get this in the mail so soon — unless she sees this post first.
