Our Thanksgiving Table Runner

I thought we would post our fun craft that we did today in preparation for Thanksgiving. One thing I've not ever really done was make something that I could bring out year after year for Thanksgiving. So I was excited to see this craft on the website Catholic Icing. It was fun, very easy to make, and the end result was wonderful.

What do you need?

Fabric Runner
Cardboard
Clorox Bleach Pen ( and, yes, they do exist)
and the peel and stick laminate
stencil of a cross ( if your not good at drawing crosses like I am )
chalk

The first thing I did was go online and find a free printable cross that I liked and wanted on our fabric runner. Printed it out at a 3x5 size on our printer. Depending on the size of your fabric runner will depend on the size you want your cross to be. 

Traced the cross on the back of my peel and stick laminate. I traced it on the back so I could use my Exacto knife to cut 

Cut out the stencil with an Exacto knife and then pull out the middle so that you have an open cross pattern to use on your fabric runner. This helps to keep the bleach from the bleach pen from running. You want a stencil that will stick to the fabric so it doesn't run.

Next place your sticky stencil down on the runner where you would like to see it. 

For us the girls decided that they wanted  one on each end .So that was where we placed them. 

Next comes the bleach pens. The aforementioned bleach pen. Would you believe this is  a big city thing and not a you- live- 45 miles- away- from -the- city -and -in- a -rural- area thing? I had actually never heard of a bleach pen. I've heard of the Tide Stain  pens, but had never seen this before reading Catholic Icing's blog. Also would you believe neither has the total population of our town either? We even went to our laundry mat and asked the lady there that does the dry cleaning there, and she had never heard of a bleach pen either. My husband began to think I was telling him a tall tale about as equivalent to the story of the tooth fairy, but low and behold, I came home, my husband did a search online(because I told him to) ,  and it was like the little child who finds out that the tooth fairy does to exist. Ha, ha!  So off to the city we went to pick up the aforementioned bleach pen. 

Next I rubbed some of the bleach from the pen onto the stencil 

and then used a paint brush to evenly distribute the bleach so that it would get to all the places it needed to be because it wasn't getting there with the pen. The nice thing is that the peel and stick laminate does a great job keeping the bleach from spreading to the rest of the fabric. 

Next take some chalk and write on your runner what you would like it to say. Chalk I found really does do the trick. Especially when you need to move your words over a little more after you writ them the first time ( hence the double writing). After centering and writing what you want on the runner, you can now write over the chalk with your bleach pen. 

  

After writing with my bleach pen I let it sit for about 15 minutes, I found 15 minutes to be the right amount of time for the bleach , to well, bleach. Ha!    Then I ran it under some cold water in the sink to stop the bleaching process. Be super duper sure you don't let it touch anything even after you've run it under cold water because it WILL bleach everything else around it because you will next need to put it in the washing machine. This I learned the hard way. I thought I had washed it off enough that it would be alright and still managed to bleach a small spot. 

After throwing it in the washing machine ( be sure to fill your washing machine first with water to be sure that it doesn't bleach the rest of your runner and wash it alone) , and drying it. The last thing to do was iron it , and here is our end result. It really did turn out super neat, and we look forward to using it on our table for Thanksgiving, and I look forward to always having something to bring out each and every year. Something that we all worked on together and are very proud of.

From our family to yours, the Reed family hopes that everyone has a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving.