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It’s that time of the week again: DIY with Mama Jen! You can see last week’s project here.
This one is particularly near and dear to my heart because we did this one together before my wedding — and it is a project to go down in DIY history! I’ll let Jen take it from here:
Bonus Alert: This is a tutorial and a wedding DIY warning all wrapped up in one!
I will confess that I love a great project and I don’t mind a little hard work/tedium when I can envision the grand finale. This time it was my daughter’s wedding…a lovely upscale rustic backyard BBQ with all of our family and closest friends…simply divine! See one runner “in-action.”
Wedding planning is a huge undertaking! I knew that together we had the skill set to do a number of things ourselves but wisdom proves that some things are best left to the pros.
After a careful cost analysis, we decided that making 20 burlap and lace runners was well worth the effort and would be a fantastic bonding mother/daughter DIY. [Natalie’s Note: Little did we know the adventure that awaited us….]
We formulated our plan. All of our wedding tables were 8 feet long and we wanted a 12″ over hang on each of end the table. We made them 16 inches wide.
We gathered the coupons, hunted the sales, and ordered the supplies.
Price/Supplies
Burlap: $25 [It’s on sale at Joann right now, but we ordered with a 40% off coupon]
Lace: about $50 [We actually spent $100/200 yards which comes out to $.50/yard. An amazing deal and I believe it was on sale at the time, but I can’t recall. We only used half of it on the runners, and then the rest for a variety of other wedding-related projects. Still to this day we have some left — wow! Buy it here.]
Fusible tape: $2.54 [We had a lot of it from old projects that we didn’t buy, but we bought some more to finish the project. Buy it here.]
Time per runner: Too much. (JK, we spent about 15 minutes per runner.)
Total Cost: $77.54
Per Runner: $3.87
And even if you add in the other $50 for lace, that’s still only $6.37 per runner. They sell retail for between $18 and $20 (for 8 ft. long), so we saved a lot of dough!
Here is the bonus warning I promised…this was an easy, beautiful DIY but 20 is a big number. [Natalie’s Note: Easy???]
Assembling the first table runner was exhilarating but by the time we reached the last it was drudgery. Thankfully the company and the cause made it all worthwhile.
Tutorial
- Cut the burlap to the desired dimensions. Despite the crush I have on burlap I was a complete novice at working with it. We found a tutorial showing us that you could cut the burlap between two vertical fibers and then pull one of the burlap threads out. This enabled me to cut nice straight lines without any additional marking.
- Cut two pieces of lace to border your burlap. [Natalie’s Note: This is where “stretch” lace came in handy! If the cuts weren’t exactly precise — and they never were — it gave us some wiggle room!]
- Fuse the lace to the burlap. My initial plan was to sew the lace onto the burlap but the stitching was terribly obvious and bunched up the lace. I decided to use fusible webbing tape, borrow an extra iron from our sweet neighbor, grab couple of extension cords, and set up a beach towel ironing station on the kitchen island.
Very important: Cover the lace with a towel or you will melt it 🙂
- Create a hem on each end of the runner. We folded under the edge slightly larger than the width of the fusible tape and ironed. Â [Natalie’s Note: The fusible webbing is inside the hem you see]
Natalie made a comment about our math skills in a previous post, and even though we ‘carefully’ measured, you will notice that we ended up with one runner that was uniquely longer than the others. Scissors could have solved the problem but we decided hiding it between the tables was easier.
And in the end, we swept up at least 3 birds nests worth of burlap fuzz. Have you ever bitten off a little more than you can chew?
[Natalie’s Note: The best part? Not only did they look stunning at my wedding, we got to pass them on to my good friend Caroline and they looked absolutely gorgeous at hers!]
