Monday, June 11, 2012

Stay put tablecloth!

I've had this idea kicking around in my head for at least 6 months now.  It just took me until today to try it out.
I got a cheap PEVA (vinyl like) table cloth from Walmart last week. I like these table cloths. They wipe up easily, and you can get kooky prints for whatever holiday. But I also knew that in my house, a table cloth would get yanked on and anything sitting on the table would go flying.
Enter scissors and elastic.

I put the table cloth on the table, and trimmed it a bit at the corners so there wasn't a great bunch hanging down. I then zigzag stitched over the edges that I trimmed so they wouldn't get weird and make the table cloth fall apart.

Then, the big idea. I tacked down some elastic, and stretched it as I sewed it down. I used a narrow zigzag set to a long stitch length - I think on my machine I had it set to a width of 2 and a length of 4. The elastic I used was 3.8" wide. I didn't take any pictures of the process because I didn't think of it, and had no idea if it would actually work anyway. But here is what the elastic looks like once it's sewed on.
 
 If you've never sewed elastic before, it's pretty easy. You just have to stretch it as you go, and use a zigzag stitch so it can spring back tight again. I have no idea how much elastic I used, either.  I had some leftover from another project, and used the rest of that, and then opened the new package and used some of that. I'd be a better tutorial person if I kept track of things like that. But in my experience, you can't ever have too much elastic laying around, so over estimate what you need.
Once you're done, whack it on your table. It looks like this underneath.
 
FANCY!
And it looks like this from above.

I'm pretty excited about how well it worked and now easy it was to do. I now have plans to collect all sorts of different prints and change them out for seasons and holidays. Why didn't I try this sooner?

1 comment:

Mommyof2 said...

Very good idea, excited to try this!