Ironing Board Envy

I'm not gonna lie..I've spent some time drooling over those large ironing boards that I've seen at various quilt shows. I may have even stopped in the middle of the aisle to stare at them. Drool may or may not have reached the floor. But their price tag has always kept them out of my reach.

Recently while ironing a yard of fabric fresh from the dryer, I had an idea. Why not transform my cutting table into an ironing board!! It would be perfect for ironing yards of fabric after pre-washing, and just right for fusing batting to any size quilt.

My cutting table.

My plan was to create and ironing board cover out of Therma-Flec that I could plop down on my cutting table when I wasn't cutting fabric. Of course this would also mean cleaning off the cutting table which is home to many misc items. But I figured a little cleaning would be worth it.

After measuring my cutting table I bought two yards of pre-quilted Therma-Flec. What I didn't realize was that the edges were raw, with batting sticking out.

I thought about serging them, but in the end, I decided to bind them with pre-made bias tape from my stash.

I didn't have any of those fancy wonder clips, so I used office binder clips to "pin" the binding in place. They worked out okay. But honestly, I had a hard time getting both sides of the binding to stitch down at the same time. And I had to flip the entire cover over and re-stitch the binding from the back catching all the spots that I had missed.

Office binder clips holding the bias tape in place.

I usually sew the front of my binding on by machine and then hand sew the back on....I like my usual method better...but I was interested in trying to machine sew both sides of binding at once. I'm sure with a bit more practice I could get the machine method down pat.  I would like to try the wonder clips and compare them to the binder clips to see if they work better/easier.  The one thing that I really did like about using the office binder clips was that they were super easy to remove. Easier than pulling pins out. I might try using the clips on other projects and see what happens.

After I had the edges bound, I was going to sew material onto the sides so that the cover would spill over the edges of my cutting table on all four sides. I had decided that I would just use clamps to hold the cover in place while ironing. But then my MIL walked in....she looked at it and said..'Why do extra work? I bet the weight of that cover would keep it in place, you can probably get away with only clamping down the two ends.' hmmmmm. Less work. I love this idea.

Completed cover!!!!

So I went with it. So far soo good. I love the cover, it makes ironing so much easier when I can really spread the fabric out. And the best part....it was super inexpensive. Which of course leaves me with more $$$ to put toward fabric!!!  :)