my lemonade project

So as you all know by now, we are a family in transition. We are settling in up north but a portion of our life is still south. One of the things we left behind in the name of home staging was our beautiful dining room set. That leaves us with a card table and four folding chairs up here for now (i.e. lemons). It makes for intimate family dinners but honestly, it can be a little depressing. So, I decided we need to make the best of this and I set into a motion a plan to make a cute tablecloth. Like every project I have ever taken on in my entire life, this one seemed to become more and more involved as time went on. Also true to form, it turned out to be more difficult and time consuming than I thought it would be as well. [As a side note - when oh when will I ever be able to properly gauge the time and brain commitment required for a project?! - shouldn't I be able to do that by now?]. Still, I love the idea and am so glad I stuck with it.

I was determined to NOT buy anything for this project - to only use what I had. I almost made it but caved and bought bias tape because I came up short in my stash. I had a good quantity of the square fabric and it didn't take long for the lightbulb to go off and think: oohhh - letters - yes letters!

So I stamped away and ta-da.

Some turned out beautifully

Others, not so much - oh well, so it goes.

The fun part is that we can play word games at the table during meal time or otherwise. What words can you make with letters on the blue squares?, how many A's can you find?
Which color square has the most vowels? and so on and so on.

And because I lean toward the practical side and because "reversible" is one of my favorite words in the crafting language, you can turn it over and find this:

We have been talking about teaching Peter how to play checkers and (maybe) chess lately
so this seemed like a fun way to get us started. I used corduroy because I like it and I have it but if I made this project again I would use cotton. The corduroy is a bit bulky and even though I don't plan to serve food on this side of the tablecloth, I am imagining those little grooves full of crumbs and it's kind of icking me out.

I know it needs more ironing and I'll probably go in and do some topstitching to keep it all together but for the most part it is done. Lemonade anyone?