Using Burlap to Add a Rustic Feel to Our Modern Dining Room Furniture

In the last blog post by Laura Redd, she talked about how our space would be improved by some simple window treatments and other finishing touches.  We took her suggestions to heart and decided to make our own curtains and table runners for several rooms in the house.  When we had our house warming party a few months ago, the event planner (Melissa Lewkowicz with Events by Design) decorated our house with colored burlap to give the space a comfortable rustic feel.  We loved the look and decided to use colored burlap on a single table runner to see how it looked.

Burlap is basically little more than the material that is used to make potato sacks.  It is not glamorous or soft in its basic form but has great texture.   Today you can find burlap in a wide variety of colors and can even find ‘high end’ burlap that is both texturally rich and soft to the touch.  We chose a few complimentary colors based on the colors throughout our house – dark brown to match the bamboo floor and dark grained furniture, light green to compliment the back wall in the dining area, and a light cream to provide brightness to the room.  For the dining room table runner (our test runner) we picked the light green burlap.

Sewing a table runner is relatively easy, even with a difficult material like burlap.  If you are inexperienced with sewing or are out of practice, don’t worry - this project is a great way to work with different stitches on long, straight runs.

The first thing that you need to do is measure your table.  A table runner can be wide or thin, based on preference.  It usually covers less than half of the width of a table while going the full length of the table plus a little overhang on each end.  For width, use your personal preference.  Lay out some cloth and play with the width to see what works best for you.  We used a 24” width for our table, which is right at half of the width of the table.  For length, we allowed 8 inches of overhang on each side, so we added 16” to the length of the table to get the length for the fabric.

With a rough material like burlap, you can expect a lot of imperfections in the cloth.  When buying your cloth, make sure that you check the material for flaws before cutting it.  Most cloth/craft stores will let you overcut flaws in the material.  When cutting your material to size, you can fold it and iron it to give it a good crease to mark the cut line.  For our table runner, I cut in about 6 inches on the corners to give the whole runner a tapered look on each end.  You can do the same, or you can cut your ends to flare out or be squared off.

Burlap is a loose weave material and is prone to fraying and coming apart if left unfinished.  If you ever try to wash it, you will know what I mean here.  The loose weave also makes burlap difficult to sew because the stitches don’t have much material to hold on to.  Don’t worry!  I have one trick that will solve both of these issues.

We will take care of these issues by doing a double folded hem along the edges.  The easiest way to do this is as follows:

1. Make sure that your burlap is cut straight and that your angles line up on each edge.

2. Fold about ½ inch of material along one edge, making the edge of the fold as straight as possible.

3. Use a warm iron to crease the fold as you go.

4. Fold the creased material over itself so that you have a doubled over fold.

5. Iron this crease as before.

6. For corners, you can simply fold them over each other or you can trim the folds to fit together (we just folded ours over each other, and it worked fine).

7. Important!  Make sure that the thread in your sewing machine and bobbin match the color of your burlap.

8. Set your sewing machine to 8 stitches per inch and a wide zig-zag pattern.

9. Sew around the entire piece, centering the wide zig-zag stitch on the hem.

10. That’s it!  You now have a beautiful table runner to provide a rustic accent to your table.

Total cost:  under $10 for cloth and matching thread.  Total time: around 45 minutes

Considering the monetary and time commitment, this is a very easy project that you can do with each season to change out the look of your dining room.  

• Peter's blog