Pedestal table slipcover

Today I'm waiting for K to finish up some work (on a Saturday :-() so that we can go out and run some errands. It's taking longer than expected, so I've decided to fill the waiting hours with easy and simple crafty projects.

The curtains in the bedroom are sage green sheers -- cheapy ones from Wal-Mart. They are fine, but they're too see-through for me, even with the mini-blinds behind them. So I took a double flat sheet and snipped the stitches on the edges of the top part of it. This opened up the folded over decorative edge and made it into a pocket I could feed onto the curtain rod. I thought it looked cool, because it was one huge piece of dark blue fabric, but K didn't like that it didn't open in the middle and that the fabric pooled at the floor because the sheet was really long. So my curtain project is on hold, as I also discovered that they weren't as opaque as I'd thought. They let in all sorts of light this morning.

So I took the sheet down and made it into a slipcover-like thing for our dining table. The table is just a gigantic piece of glass over a wicker pedestal. I like pedestal tables, but I hate wicker. And our entire collection of apartment furniture is... wicker. The glass is also annoying, as it gets dirty a lot and sticks out far, making it a bigger table than we need, very heavy, and easy to accidentally run into. But it does easily clean (very often) with Windex.

I draped the sheet over the table. Some of the corners pooled on the floor because it was too long, and other ends stopped halfway down. So I laid it out on the floor and measured the pedestal. It is 29 inches in diameter and, including its waist-like shape, is about 31 inches in height. I added that all up and proceeded to cut a big 91 inch circle out of that sheet. Of course, it wasn't quite 91 inches square -- it was more like 92 inches by 79 inches. But I measured to the center using the radius of what I wanted the fabric to be (45 1/2 inches, which I rounded to 46 so it used up that last inch of the sheet's length). I marked it and measured outward around the sheet in a circle. Of course when I got to the short end I ran out of fabric to mark on, but I fixed that for the most part a few minutes later.

I cut it out, following the chalk markings, and realized it may have been easier to mark the center and then fold it in half and in quarters with the dot as the center (rather than the center of the fabric as the center). I'm not sure if my logic is working on that, but since I was trying to make a symmetrical object, I thought that would be smart. Anyway, the fabric was a circle except for one side, which was about 13 inches too short. I took the scraps from the corners I cut off and sewed one onto that side, the long, curved edge to the straight, uncut edge. It added more than 13 inches to it, but only in the middle, because the corner piece was, well, a corner piece, and sort of a triangle shape. I didn't feel like sewing on more, so I put it on the pedestal to see how it looked so far and arranged the folds of the fabric so that you can't see the wicker where the short gaps were. It looked pretty good, and you have to look hard to realize I put minimal effort into it. I tied it with a cream grosgrain ribbon and put clear nail polish on the ends.

And voila!



It looks much better, I think. I had been thinking of this for a while, but never thought about color. I love blue, so I like it, but I have no idea if that is the color I wanted for the dining table. I think someday I'm going to cover those chairs, too, so perhaps I'll choose a lighter color that matches this dark blue.