Sewing: Bandana Quilt Tablecloth (Tutorial)

I made this bandana quilt tablecloth for my daughter's birthday party and love how it turned out. I picked orange, pink, light blue and white as those are the colors of the party but I think this would be great in a multitude of combinations, including patriotic red, white and blue.


I made the cloth 5 22" bandanas long by 3 wide--it's plenty generous for my folding plastic table, dining table, and would be good for a standard picnic table.



The first step was assembling the bandanas. I got some 110% cotton 22"x22" bandanas at Tan's Club. They have a great selection of color and are very inexpensive. I found them to be relatively uniform in size too though not exactly square. I washed, dried and ironed mine before beginning to avoid shrinkage and color bleeding later.

Because I was ordering extra for party favors I didn't figure out my pattern of colors before hand, just made sure I had sufficient quantity and ordered the same number of each color.

Before sewing, figure out the pattern of the final tablecloth. It's fun to lay it out and decide if you want a regular or irregular patern. I did bit of both. My pattern was:

P W O W P
B P W O W
O B P B O

Then start the sewing with your short rows (rows of three). Pin the bandanas right sides together aligning the edges and corners where they meet to form a row--so my first row involved sewing the edge of the pink to the blue bandana, and then the edge of the blue bandana to the orange. After sewing, press the seams to one side to keep the work neat.


Once you have your five short rows (of three bandanas each) you can sew these rows together at the long edges to form the tablecloth quilt. I lined my short rows up again to verify that I wanted to proceed with the pattern I had planned--I actually flipped the middle row based on my initial plan because it made the pattern less regular.

To sew these short rows to each other, pin the rows right sides together, aligning the ends/corners and the seams so the seams match as well as possible.

Sew, removing pins as you go. After sewing press the seam allowances to one side.

Because I was using purchased bandanas rather than quilting squares I had cut to an exact 22"x22", there were some irregularities but luckily this was overcome by a bit of stretching and easing as I sewed. If you find, as I did, that one color of bandana is longer in a dimension you can "cheat" this by creating a bigger seam (so for instance, my white bandanas were left a bit wider in the short rows, so they extended out and then I sewed straight seams when putting these short rows together leaving a bigger seam allowance on the white bandanas hidden on the backside of the tablecloth.) Another solution would be to trim all your bandanas to a uniform size before beginning. Either way, I found the bandanas to be more forgiving than I had thought and the quilt came together nicely despite a few sizing discrepancies.

Voila! Would be fun to do some more, but I am likely on to other things on my list.

If you make a Bandana Quilt Tablecloth I would love to see and share your take on this in my Flickr Group here!