Vintage tablecloth into a quilt

Vintage tablecloth into a quilt? It seems like an odd idea but it works! Have an old tablecloth that belonged to your mother or grandmother with stains of family dinners past or holes from age that you cannot seem to part with? Make it into a quilt.

In addition to my affinity for vintage quilts, fabrics and notions I also collect tablecloths. Many of them are riddled with holes and stains and are no longer suitable to use on my dining room table. I keep thinking that one of these days I will find a use for them and today I have. I will show you how I have taken a beautiful and neglected tablecloth and made it into a beautiful lap quilt. I hope this will inspire you to rethink some of the old linens that you can't bear to part with.

I started with this beautiful pink tablecloth that I have had stashed for years. Even though it had some stains an pulled threads I just couldn't part with it. I knew at some point I would find a use for it and I have. 

This is one of the worst stains on the tablecloth. It extended from the outer edge all the way into the pink and the flowers. There was also some discolorations on the pink center but they didn't show up very well in the photos. 

The first step in this quilt is to wash and press all of your fabrics that you plan to use. This is an important step if you plan to ever wash your finished project. Chances are your tablecloth has been washed at some point in it's life and you want to avoid any shrinkage on your finished quilt with the unwashed fabrics.

Once it has been washed and pressed you get to have some fun picking out fabrics to go with it. I was lucky enough that there was enough usable fabric in the tablecloth that I only had to add some black fabric to make the pink and flowers pop. 

Next came the design phase. I use two pieces of cardboard cut into L shapes. I placed them on the tablecloth to decide how big I wanted to cut the blocks that had the flowers. For this tablecloth the flowers are so pretty I didn't want to cut blacks that were too small. 

Next, is the cutting. I cut off the white border and then cut the center solid pink portion leaving me with just the flower border. I decided that I wanted to have a large center to the quilt with the pretty flowers so I cut the corners off into blocks and then the remaining border fussy cut into smaller blocks. 

I sewed the 4 corner blocks together so that I had a pretty center to build off of.

Because I really wanted the center to pop, I bordered that in black and then added the white and pink border from the tablecloth after the black. 

Then it gets a it more complicated. I had to go through and figure out how much usable tablecloth fabric I had left and plot what I was going to do. I find that at this point graph paper is my best friend. I take colored pencils an make each square on the paper 1''. Measure your center piece and mark that on your graph paper and build off of that. Since there really is no pattern you can let your imagination run wild. For my finished quilt I had plenty of the flower border left, some of the white and as much black (not part of the original tablecloth) as I needed.  The one parameter I was working with was the size of the flower border so I used that as the size for any other blocks I would make. Once all of the blocks were made and attached I added a black border to the whole quilt and this is the finished product...........

 

I cannot wait to get this quilted up!

Do you have old linens that would work for a project like this? Did you make something spectacular from linens that most people would simply throw away? Please share them.