Prettying up the tea party (no Mad Hatter here!)

The girls have been playing restaurant and cafe quite a bit as of late.  Allie also enjoys pretend tea parties, usually with dolls and buddies (aka stuffed animals) as tea guzzling guests.  Back in the spring, I came across a really cute picnic quilt on a sewing blog that was given to a teacher at the end of the school year.  I'm not a quilter but I told the girls that I would sew one for them.  It will be a good test run before I attempt gifts for teachers.  (And yes, I know that it's only September and that school has just started but BUT you can never plan too far in advance.  Especially in our home.)

For one of her recent tea parties, Allie had used an overturned Tupperware storage container as her table.  I was thinking that she could use the to-be-sewn-someday picnic quilt as a tablecloth and then, duh, decided that it would be much more practical to just sew a tablecloth for her.  So we visited Sarah's Sew Shop, where she picked out fabric for a tablecloth and for some cloth napkins.



The tablecloth measures just over three feet wide and is approximately four and a half feet long.  I turned the edges and sewed to keep it from fraying.  Especially when it is laundered.



I had just enough of this pink with white dots fabric Allie chose to make four cloth napkins (about 7 inches by 7 inches) and two smaller, doll napkins (about 4 inches by 4 inches.)  To keep the napkins from fraying, I used a zig zig stitch that overlapped the edge of the fabric.  Unfortunately, because the fabric is thin and the napkins are only one layer of fabric, my machine almost ate a few of them.   Thankfully, they all survived.









The tablecloth is also a perfect fit for the small table in the playroom.  I have to say that this was a super quick sewing project.  Rich usually rolls his eyes whenever I embark on a sewing journey.  Especially when I utter the word "easy."  I was finished with this one before he even really knew that I had started it.