Valentine's Day table runner

I have accumulated quite a few Valentine's Day decorations over the past decade of being married, but I didn't have anything cute to put on the kitchen island.  My mother-in-law had bestowed upon me a bunch of holiday-themed fabric scraps a few months back, so I dug through them and pulled out some with hearts on them to mix in with a couple from my stash.  One morning of watching Peter and his bestie, Ben, playing in the basement, plus a bit of time the next afternoon while the boys were playing at Ben's house, and voila!

The runner is about one yard long, and about 14" wide.  I used store-bought quilt binding bias tape for the edging because I was too lazy to make any of my own.

I cut the strips 3" wide, sewed three of them together, cut the strips into squares, and stuck them together in alternating directions.  Worked out a tad better than previous quilting efforts.  Here is a better shot from overhead.  Peter had a conniption when he saw me standing on the island, and then demanded to come up as well.  Um, no.

I'm low on felt, so I actually used two layers of fusible fleece in between the top and backing.  They weren't really fused to anything, though.  The backing is the red striped fabric (from an old sheet my friend, Kym, gave me to use for sewing projects).  I'm still too chicken to do anything other than straight-line quilting, so I just drew a grid on with a water-soluble fabric marking pencil and went to town.

Unfortunately, the blue marking pencil is not quite as water-soluble as I was led to believe, so you can still see it in spots.  I'm petrified to wash this thing, but that might be the thing necessary to clean it up.  My kids are bound to spill something on it soon, anyway!


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