Fall Stack & Slash Table Runner for Ivette

My friend, Ivette, is a super talented photographer and has two terrific kids.  Her son, Ben, and my son, Peter, are such good buddies that they can play happily for hours and hours together and all we have to do is throw a snack or two at them every once in a while -- no toy refereeing needed.  That is pretty amazing for a three-year-old and a four-year-old!  Anyway, after she took some beautiful fall photos of our family, I decided to make her a pretty fall table runner to say thank you (and practice my nascent quilting skills as well).

I used a very simple Stack & Slash Table Runner tutorial from Samelia's Mum.  It's great for someone like me who hasn't quite got the hang of intricate (or, to be honest, even basic) piecework but who wants practice with the basic steps of quilting beyond the piecework.  I used some of the gorgeous fabrics that my friend, Amanda, bought for me, and came up with this:

You really can't see it in these cell phone pictures (I forgot to take glamor shots with my good camera, so I asked Ivette to send me some phone shots of it on her table), but I quilted it by tracing a bunch of different-sized overlapping circles all over it.  That was actually a pain in the butt to do because I had a ton of thread ends to tie off and work in on the backside.  Then, I had to wash the runner because I don't have one of those cool disappearing ink markers on hand anymore and I needed to get the pencil marks off.  That caused the fabric to bubble up a bit, which made me realize I needed to make my quilting lines a little closer together in the future to minimize that.

Ivette has a really neat long, rustic farmhouse style table in her kitchen, and it turned out that the runner fit perfectly on it under her cool candle holder.  The back of the runner is the same black and white damask print as the binding.

I would love to make this runner again for my table!  I think I would start out with larger blocks (the pattern is based off of squares from a 10" layer cake, so that's why it turned out a tad skinny.  It looks great on Ivette's long table, though.  I wish I could give Ivette something half as beautiful as what she gave me.  I mean, have you ever seen a better picture of Petey?  Thank you, Ivette!