No-sew table cloth and a word about books
A couple of yards of fabric bought for $3 at a thrift store. An iron and ironing board. Scissors. Patience.
The finished no sew table cloth.
I bought some new pillows and started to photograph them.
I photograph as a matter of course.
Glaring back at me was a hidden mess revealed by a flash, our family stash of comics collections.
I decided to cover it up by improving the table cloth. I wanted to keep the scarf I had but unfortunately I didn't have a complimentary fabric. In my fabric stash, I found a fabric I thought would work for the space. It was a $3 thrift store find from last year.
I buy fabric when it catches my eye and I think it will work in my home or for a specific project. Fabric tends to be expensive and given that the patterns often change seasonally, I'm always looking for something different.
I didn't want to sew edges and corners so I determined that overlapping the fabric in two directions, compass wise (clock) at WE (9/3) and NS(12/6), would suffice. I decided that the longest piece would fit side to side. The books are accessed on the left so I wanted something that could easily be lifted out of the way to see the books. I measured it so it would hang just above the carpet. Then I cut the length and ironed it.
The front is the only part I need to ensure was covered on the N-S face. I placed it at a similar height off the floor. There wasn't enough fabric to reach the back side but that was alright. I decided that piece could just be placed under the E-W facing fabric. I lined up the pattern between the two pieces. Then I trimmed and ironed and put it in place. Then I set the table with the design elements.
Another photo revealed I had succeeded in hiding the books.
The books under the table, now hidden from the camera's eye.
About those books...
Our family loves books. Parting with books is hard but we do it by donating to our libraries several times a year. We replace lesser editions that are aged, dog earred, and sometimes creased. Others we donate as we find additions to collections. Books come and go but some we won't let go of; these are those books, part of the family comic collections.
When the children were small we finally got cable after a Halloween timed vacation where we all fell for monster marathons on the sci fi channel and the kids' offerings on the hotel tube. The kids started watching tv shows like RugRats. For a while they would play act out the RugRats roles they saw with their Barbies and GI Joes.
Then Reed and Peter were introduced to Calvin and Hobbes when we found several collections at Friends book sales. Calvin and Hobbes replaced the RugRats characters.
As they grew, the kids took on the Calvin and Hobbes roles in live action play. The Transmogrifier and Space Man Spiff were favorites played in cardboard boxes. Their porch at the old house was the perfect tree house fort. My daughter was the faithful Hobbes to her brother's Calvin. Despite being younger, his impishness won him the role. Her height did lend some credence to her role as Calvin's companion. And neither seemed to care that sister Reed, as Hobbes, was a girl just like that stinky annoying Susie Derkins.
When we moved into our current home, the children were 5 and 7. The cable TV did not come with us. The kids had books, these books under this living room table. Calvin and Hobbes were joined by the Peanuts gang, Groo the Wanderer, Tintin, Hercules amongst the North Americans, and many others. At last in separate rooms, they put up book shelves and started their own collections.
As adults, at holidays and birthdays, someone always reaches under this table and pulls out a comic or three. Some aren't the original books; many are replacements. Those first books were shoved under pillows, into backpacks, and slept on, tangled in covers, loved to death, consigned to a recycling bin. But they are all loved and all are copies of good editions. Those books are placed gently on shelves as part of a much larger comic and graphic arts collection of newspaper and political art, advertising art, and other printed art. The kids still have enormous book collections and we have a library in our home. Nearly every room in our home has books and we still read comics and my husband is a cartoonist in his own right.
