Hi, it’s me again, Katie the burlap queen. Thankfully, that is a temporary title.
For those of you that don’t know, I have two jobs. This one with DuoParadigms, where I do several different tasks, from writing blog posts to doing crafty things with wedding invitations.
My other job is with Innovative Linens, a linens rental company. I do all sorts of different things for them too, like update Facebook and sew table runners. I love both of my jobs, but recently both have had me working with a very pretty, and pretty annoying fabric. Burlap.
For Innovative Linens, we had a wedding coming up and they wanted 30 burlap runners for their tables, 30 BURLAP RUNNERS!!!
Guess whose job that was.
Mine!!! Oh Joy!
Well, I had seen plenty of pins on Pinterest much like this one telling you how to cut burlap. I am here to tell you that it works! However, when working with as much burlap as I was, you become very itchy and when I swept the floor I gathered enough fuzz for a small dog.
We used the runners at the wedding and they were beautiful! After a quick tear down, they were thrown into a pile to be cleaned later. With that little bit of rough handling, the edges were starting to fray. We now have a couple of fringed burlap table runners. I will probably end up sewing a zigzag stitch around the edge of the runners to keep them from fraying.
DuoParadigms’ burlap project was a little different. Instead of cutting a lot of burlap into 30 things, I had to cut a smaller amount of burlap into 140 things. We needed burlap to go on the back of some wedding invitations.
Your mission, if you should choose to accept it, is to cut 3½ yards of burlap into 140 5×7 inch squares.
Bring it!
I really didn’t want to take all that time to pull all the strings through so that I could get straight lines. I did want it pretty stiff though. I thought maybe, if I starched it really well, it wouldn’t fray.
I was doing all of this while at the Innovative Linens shop where there is a really nice thing called a commercial iron. I thought I would save some time by running my heavily starched burlap through the awesome commercial iron.
Yeah, that didn’t work.
The burlap stuck to the hot roller and started to burn. To make a long story short, Mary and Matt came and rescued me from my own genius and together we freed the burlap from its prison of hot metal with minimal damage!
I took the burlap home and hand ironed it. Then took it back to the shop and used our giant cutting table and an old rotary cutter (you will just dull anything new or sharp that you use to cut burlap) to quickly reduce it to a pile of 5×7 inch pieces.
While I was writing this post, I found this pin that describes exactly how I ended up cutting the burlap for the invitations (without the detour to the burlap prison)!
I hope you have fun with all of your burlap projects for this fall and we would love to hear about them, just tell us what you are working on in the comments below!
Happy Crafting!
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