Work With Whatcha Got

For me, the road to hoarding is paved with endless craft supplies and unfinished projects.  One of my resolutions for 2013 was not only to be more productive, but also use what I already have. 

While my husband was out taking care of this

I got to work on some hand-painted burlap table runners inspired these I saw on etsy.  

 

I already had all of the supplies I needed and it was high time to work with what I have! 

My plan was to make three runners - one for my bedside table, one for the tv table, and one for the dining table - all using paint I already had.

I measured and marked where I should cut.   

I used red sharpie. Bad choice.  

The most time consuming aspect of this project was measuring for the stripes and then marking them.  Clearly I didn't learn from the first time I made this mistake, and used red sharpie again.  Next up I tried a small ball point black pen, which resulted in the opposite problem as the red sharpie, but an equally bad choice.  

Then I just used pins to guide me.

Before masking out the last few stripes, I realized you could probably just eye-ball it.

I used small foam rollers to paint the stripes.

I was pleasantly surprised by how crisp the lines turned out.  There were few incidents of bleeding beneath the tape.  

While I like the orange one a lot, it doesn't work on the tv table.  The green one is my least favorite because of the lack of contrast between the paint and the burlap.  It may resurface around Halloween with some black.  

I cut and hemmed smaller strips of muslin to line the bottom of each runner to conceal the paint came that came through on the under side and give them a more finished feel. 

Then I sewed the muslin and burlap together.

If I were to do this project again, I would be sure to hem the muslin with a more similarly colored thread.  I would also try to measure, cut, and pin everything a bit more precisely and uniformly.  This would also to ensure that the seam connecting the liner to the burlap could also serve as a means of prohibiting  burlap from fraying. 

Overall, I was pleased with the results, especially given the challenges burlap presents.

Here is my favorite one put to use:

This was the first project in a very long time that I was able to make using only supplies I already had!