Progress (Sorry for lack of scale!).
So - I don't even know how to start about describing how excited I am about this project. My parents have a table. It's a gorgeous, heavily carved (griffons on the feet!) dark wood table, and it's wider than most, making tablecloth sourcing difficult (but thanksgiving seating easy!). I've made her a couple tablecloths so far, one with extra-wide quilting cotton backing (easy), and the other with pieced linen (hard). Need for ironing is kind of a no-no, but she is willing to put up with some if it's extra festive.
That's how this got started. There are so many beautiful hand-made linens in the shops here, and I don't, after all, have access to a sewing machine. I started looking around on pinterest about embroidered and crocheted tablecloths, and finally narrowed down my choices to the following graph:
I ordered some actual LINEN fine crochet thread off of amazon.co.uk - it is antique, from the 1950's, I think. Real linen! I swatched up a chunk, washed and stretched it, measured, and came to the conclusion that the chart above would give me a square cloth of the dimensions of my parent's table without any leaves. Done and done.
I am on line 15 or so now, out of a few hundred! On the chart I printed out, I've drawn lines for the months, i.e., the point I need to get to if I'm going to finish by Christmas! I'm ahead of it so far, but can really only do about one row a night, if that's all I focus on. I think I got about 5 rows done on the plane from the UK to Denver. This is serious stuff! Of course, I already suspect that the final product is going to be smaller than I planned for, but perhaps I can crochet on an edging at the end to make it wider?
It has been fun to see that little deer emerge from the linen.
This is seriously crazy -- good luck!
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