Decorative Thanksgiving Table Runner
With your Brother sewing/embroidery combo machine you can make seasonal table runners to set the mood for the entire dining room or kitchen. While the colors are all about fall, the text is all about gratitude. Use it for Thanksgiving or anytime. This relative easy project includes some techniques here that might be new to you. In a different palette, the project and two especially lovely ibroidery.com designs could be for Christmas, Independence Day or any seasonal holiday.
Requirements:
- Fabric: 2 yds. linen
- Notions: Wing needle, spray starch, tearaway or heavy water soluble stabilizer
- Thread: Embroidery and fine thread for hemstitching, preferably 80 wt cotton but 50 or 60 wt. thread will work
- Designs: ibroidery.com edpr10 013
and edpr10 014
Construction
- Cut linen 20” x 60”. Pulling a thread is the best way to get the fabric cut perfectly straight and on grain, which is important for this project.
- Starch heavily and press until crisp and dry.
- Press creases in the sequence shown in photo to create mitred corners.
Note: Take care to use glass head or solid metal pins when holding creases in place before pressing. Plastic heads will melt into the fabric.
- Step 1: Fold all four raw edges 2” to wrong side and press.
- Step 2: Fold raw edge ½” to wrong side and press around the entire perimeter.
Note: The 2” crease is most important. If there is any irregularity in the ½ crease, it will affect the 2” crease. By doing that first, you may avoid an uneven hem later.
- Step 3: Fold corner to center and press as indicated in the illustration.
- Press corner diagonally with ½” edge folded to wrong side. Press while matching 2” crease lines.
- Unfold and trim corner to reduce bulk. Cut just below the corner of the fold
- Refold and baste diagonally folded corner in place. Repeat with each corner.
Note: Because this particular linen is very heavy, the inside corner was cut away as shown in this diagram. Remove the basting threads within that area.
- Fold outside edges to folded corner and baste in place. Baste diagonal folds with wide, long zig zag, as those stitches will have to be removed later. Now you have a perfectly mitered corner. Repeat with 3 remaining corners. Then baste entire hemline 1/4-3/8” from ½” fold.
Hemstitching
- Select Sewing option on opening page.
- Select the pin stitch #3-04 on THE Dream Machine XV8500D
in menu #3. It is in the same menu with the same number, #3-04, on the Quattro Innov-is 6700D
and the Duetta,
Innov-is 4000D
and 4500D.
- Insert wing needle.
Note: DO NOT USE THE AUTOMATIC NEEDLE THREADER WITH A WING NEEDLE. It may damage the device and incur an inconvenient and costly repair.
- Attach a carefully selected foot. Pin stitch looks best on the right side of the fabric and when using sheer fabric, the fold is easily seen. The N foot is recommended and works well in such situations. With this linen and other heavier fabrics, that hem fold can be felt but not seen on the right side. I had success the 7mm open toe foot SA147
by proceeding with Step 5.
- Marking the edge of the hem fold from the right side with a heat erasable marker gives a visible guideline. Adding the laser, using the marked line as a guide increases accuracy.
- Adjust the laser width position to line up with the marked line.
- Penetrate the marked and/or laser line with the left swing of the needle, which is the forward/backward stitch which leaves the hole. The clear plastic open toe foot gives good visibility. Additionally, the foot had no problem riding with one toe on three thicknesses of heavy linen while the other toe rode on just one thickness.
- Thread both needle and bobbin in a color to match the fabric. Remember, do not use the automatic threader with the wing needle.
- Do a “stitch rehearsal” on a heavily starched scrap folded to three thicknesses just like the hem. Adjust stitch width and length for your fabric and select a different foot if #20 does not give you satisfactory results.
Note: The forward/backward stitches will be in the single layer of fabric while the “reach” stitch will penetrate the three layers one time and return to the previous hole in the single layer.
- Pay extra attention at the corners where there are even more fabric thicknesses. In the perfect sewing world, the pivot stitch will fall precisely at the corner. (I’d like the address of that perfect sewing world.)
- Remove zig zag basting threads at corners and hand sew this opening closed.
- Remove basting threads around perimeter.
Embroidery
- Select design edpr10 013
for the short ends.
- Use the machines built in alphabets or take the design into your PE-Design software and add text there. I chose “Blessed” and “Thankful” but “gratitude” and “abundance” would also fit the Thanksgiving theme.
- Embroider edpr10- 014
at the center of each side. The design center was place 2 ¼” above the hemstitching. I chose to reverse the designs so the large flower is at opposite ends.
Note: The ibroidery.com design is 11.65” long. A smaller version, 8.5” long, is a built-in design on THE Dream Machine. It is design 086 in the first menu.
Notes: The thread colors used for each design are different, both ends and side. I prefer variety. When varying colors, keeping some elements the same gives the entire piece some uniformity. They look like siblings rather than next door neighbors. In each of the four embroideries the brown ribbon outline, the green vines and leaves are the same. The “tangerine” called for in the ribbon and many other components is, indeed, tangerine in one end and one side. A rust color was substituted in the other two. Many of the other colors are the same.
Why not get started on this seasonal table runner, especially since all ibroidery.com designs currently are marked down 25% off regular price(until December 31, 2017). That’s something to be thankful for!
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