New Blue Tablecloth

It wasn't until AFTER we completed the Great Room Switch that I realized that this, my children's former bedroom, my current study/studio, is REALLY small. I mean really small. It's basically an enlarged hallway with a closet.

I've been used to working in my former study/studio, now my children's bedroom, which was larger and also completely stuffed full with many upon many shelves and bins of stuff, stuff that simply won't fit tidily into this smaller room, stuff that now spills out messily onto the floor and sits in piles and makes me feel like a hoarder and an awful person.

All this is to explain, of course, why I have been stash busting so single-mindedly this year. I've been listing random bits of extra supplies in my pumpkin+bear etsy shop--

--sewing the girls entire wardrobes of summer clothing from a few years' accumulation of awesome thrifted T-shirts, and finishing up projects that have been long dead in the water.

For instance...do you like my new tablecloth?

I strip pieced it sometime in 2011 entirely out of blues from my stash fabric, most of which was given to me by other crafters getting out of the sewing game over the years, then decided that I hated it and folded it away and stuffed it in a closet.

Nothing gets stuffed away in this new tiny room, so last week as I was attempting to pull something else out of the same space, a bunch of crap fell out (and it's still on the floor), including this pieced top, and I thought, "Hmmn, why did I hate that? I love it now!"

Does that ever happen to you? It happens to me enough that it's now a thing--if I make something and hate it, I just have to put it away for a bit and the next time I see it, I'll love it.

I backed it with plain blue fabric, also stash, stitched and turned it, quilted it, and set the table:

I'm not perfectly happy with it; I think because of all the different types of fabrics that I used in the top (I attempted to get all cotton, but since I don't know the provenance of most of this I'm thinking that I mixed a lot of cotton and cotton blends together, and of course a lot of slightly different weights), it simply does not lay flat, but instead is lofted and rumply and, well, quilted:

It does make the table look comfy and homey, however, like having a picnic on a quilt outdoors. We're on a brief hiatus from schoolwork right now, so I haven't yet decided if, when we begin again next week, I'll want to roll the tablecloth back from our work surface or finally get around to making the Waldorf-style painting boards that I've been contemplating making for...well, my children's whole lives, likely.