My Ever Evolving Dining Room...

I was going to link back to previous posts about re-do's to my kitchen table and chairs, hutch, window treatments and all of that. But for some reason the pictures that were in those posts are gone, so I dug some up that I found on the hard drive and unfortunately, that's all I have.

A couple years ago I redid my kitchen table. It was not fun. But I love how it turned out.

It went from oak to black.

I added new chair pads and place mats and this was the general color scheme of the room:

I love the mustards and reds.

I decided to play up the black of the table because we have hardwood floors that are kind of light, as you can see, and I thought black and a lighter color, maybe a taupe, would look cleaner. Less busy.

So I made some roman-ish shades with the tan-ish color and black ruffles.

D'oh! Now I need the table stuff to complement the treatments.

see? tan-ish and black.

I got some new chair pads...

...but what about the table? I don't like table cloths, so that was out. I was not paying between 5 and 10 bucks apiece for stupid placemats and I definitely am not making 4 placemats. I'm not that talented. Or talented at all, really, but whatever.

I had been browsing around Etsy and found some awesome hand made table runners ranging from muslin to burlap and other shabby chic materials that were super cute.

But they were pretty expensive and I wasn't going to buy them.

Aha!

Why buy one when I can make one? And use the same exact fabric I used on my window treatments so it's a sure match?

Last Sunday, while it was freaking raining here, (in the middle of July. come on!) I decided to have some quality time with my sewing machine. I didn't use a pattern, because, frankly, I don't know how to use one and I don't have one anyway.

I just cut two long strips of fabric and put them face side together and sewed the long sides together, like a tube.

Took some different fabric and made it ruffly, sewed it to the inside of the ends of  "tube", sewed the end shut, the other end almost shut and then used the small hole left to pull the thing right side out. Make sense? No? Doesn't to me either, but hey, it worked.

Here's the finished product:

when i originally bought the fabric i made the ruffle out of, i wanted to use it in a way that the frayed edge showed because that was my favorite part.

Alas, the project I had slated the fabric for, the window treatments, actually, was too big for the amount of fabric that I had.

I love how it turned out and it might be my favoritist project ever!

And it only took me 1 1/2 hours tops to "design" and make it.

And? No cussing. Weird!

And here it is in all it's matchy matchy glory:

I think I'll probably put the mustard/red stuff back for the fall. What do you think?