I wanted to do something a little crafty for Halloween, but given the constraints on my time these days, it obviously needed to be simple and quick. I decided to make a placemat/runner for the small table in our kitchen and planned to stop by Joann to pick up a couple cute fabrics — but then as I was unpacking my Halloween stuff, I rediscovered these two dish towels that I bought on sale at Target right before Halloween last year. The fabric was a little stiff and the one of the left was embroidered, so it didn’t seem like they would ever be anything other than purely DECORATIVE (i.e. not usable) towels, so repurposing them into a reversible table runner turned out to be the perfect solution.
(Please pardon the horrible lighting and color balance on the photos in this post. I didn’t have time to process them and in the interest of not waiting until Christmas to post something related to Halloween, I figured I’d go ahead with the straight-out-of-the-camera shots.)
This was a REALLY quick and dirty project. I didn’t spend much time thinking about the right way to do things, and instead just did whatever came to mind first as long as I knew it would work. First, I cut the hems off the black towel and made sure the embroidered ghost design was centered. Then I created my stack! If I’d felt like spending a little more time on this, I would have stacked my fabrics and batting like a traditional quilt and added binding around the edges, but I didn’t want to mess with binding. So instead, my stack was a little backwards — a piece of quilt batting I had left over from a previous quilting project on the bottom, then the black and white towel (right side up), and finally the embroidered ghosts (right side down, although that’s hard to tell in the photos since the embroidery was visible on both sides).
I suppose you could leave out the batting entirely, but I wanted the finished product to have a little more weight than just two thin towels.
After making the stack, I pinned the sides and marked the ends. I wanted the ends to be pointed, so I measured and laid out where I wanted to cut with masking tape, since I didn’t have any kind of pen or pencil that would have shown up on black fabric. I cut away all the excess fabric and batting and was finally ready to sew.
I left one end open so that I could turn the whole thing right side out, then top-stitched around the edge to close the end and give a more finished look. Note to anyone who wants to do something like this — don’t leave the pointy end open! I did, so I had to finagle turning a hem under on the point and keeping it in place well enough to look nice. I managed in the end, but it would have been easier to just leave a few inches along one flat side open. Duh.
Ta da! The finished product turned out just as I had envisioned — a nice, reversible small table runner. Going in, I liked the embroidered ghosts better but when I actually put it down on the table, I ended up liking the black and white printed side a lot more. It provides a lot more contract on our dark table and is more identifiable from a distance as a Halloween decoration.
