Quiltmania Transforms your Grandmother’s Table Cloth
I was doing a bit of procrastinating and was looking through some recent magazines. Quiltmania is my absolute favorite quilting publisher. Their eponymous magazine inspires me every quarter, and over the years they have added other titles including Simply Vintage and Simply Moderne.
Do you have any hand embroidered tablecloths from grandma’s (or even great grandma’s) closet? The cover of Quiltmania’s Simply Vintage Spring 2020 issue took me down memory lane. I don’t have table cloths, but, I do have pillow cases that my mom let me take to college because she didn’t want them anymore.
According to her my aunt embroidered them. lol
I think many of us have seen these. White linens (napkins, table cloths, pillow cases, etc.) with hand embroidery of varying skill.. Since at least the early 1900s patterns were printed in magazines so embroiderers could transfer the lines to their own household linens for hand embroidery.
Eventually companies started selling kits that came with pre-stamped linens. Manufacturers still make these kits. If you want a vintage kit, search for company names like Bucilla, Progress, and Paragon on Ebay or Etsy.
Back to Simply Vintage Summer 2020. Designer Chris Jurd used a vintage embroidered table cloth. I decided to buy one on Ebay. There are tons of them for under $20. She uses English paper piecing and little bit of appliqué. Her pattern would be very easy to adapt to whatever tablecloth you can buy, beg, or borrow.
Resources for this project:
Papers for English paper piecing
