For Faye

SHHH!!
If you: a) live anywhere in middle TN or b) know anyone, anywhere named Faye - then please keep the following information 'under your hat' for the next few days.

When I went on the glorious women's retreat to Gatlinburg last fall one of the bible study leaders asked us all to bring an apron. As we all discussed our aprons it came up in conversation that I had sold some aprons at a craft fair a while back. Faye mentioned that she had an old tea towel (from her aunt? I hope I've remembered this part right) that she'd never known what to do with. Could I make an apron out of it? Absoultely I can!
When I came home for Christmas, Faye had given the tea towel to my mom so I could bring it back to Louisville. Well I don't know what tea towels are traditionally used for, but this one was much bigger than the sad little things they sell today. I emailed Faye and told her there was enough material to expand our horizions if we wanted. We settled on making a table runner.

Today, the table runner is on it's way to TN, but I wanted to post some pictures of the process so she can see the before/after when her package arrives.

First, I spent way too long on flickr and etsy looking up pictures of table runners trying to find a pattern I liked. I wanted the tea towel to still be recognizable when it was done instead of chopping it up into a million pieces. Once I had a solid plan, I went to my favorite fabric store and found some coordinating fabrics.



Next step - the cutting. This part was very scary. I hate chopping into something, because once you do, there is no turning back. I "fussy cut" several of the images from one half of the fabric. The other half I left whole, planning to make it the reverse of the runner.

Next I paired each image with a fabric

This little guy is my favorite

I'm not sure how long a table runner is supposed to be, but I wanted this one to be longer than than the tea towel would allow. So I took the scraps from the coordinating fabrics to make a large patchwork block to go on either end of the back fabric.
Originally, I was only going to use the cherries for the binding. But I ended up putting a few small strips inside the runner.

And thread color! I do this to myself every time. I go willy nilly picking out fabrics with no regard to thread color. I did not want the quilting lines to stand out. But I had red, green, gold and white backgrounds. Duh. I knew that using white would show up too much on the reds and greens but perhaps a tan would be okay? Lucky for me, it worked out great. At close view, you can see it, but from a distance it fades away. And hopefully people will be eating when this is nearby instead of looking too closely. But I did use white for the binding. I love binding. You have to do it by hand and it makes me feel very domestic sitting on the couch with a needle and thread.

So...here is table runner front:

And table runner back: (with patchwork squares on either end of the tea towel)