My need for more springy tablecloths started me thinking about what I might like to make to fill the gap. This sort of idea is usually just the platform I dive from and the finished product may not be spring-like at all, but everything starts somewhere, and here we are at the beginning. What looks like spring? Spring is fresh and new...young leaves in golden green and clean lines like checkerboards...how about some vines running over a green and white checkerboard? Okay! Should the vine switch from dark to light depending on what color square it is crossing? No, too flickery, but the vine stems should be barely suggested and the checkerboard should be broken. I make these decisions as I draw and scribble on a small preliminary pattern, not very neatly executed. When I get the proportions of things working together, the vines moving across the space in a reasonable way, and the dark squares placed, I move to the proper scale for a tablecloth.
The linen I have chosen is 54" square, so I can make a cloth that is 48" square, leaving room for hemming and weirdness around the edges. This is actually kind of close, I usually make a smaller pattern and then add a border. There won't be much of a border on this one. I make sixteen separate 12" squares on tracing paper, each one further broken down into 3" squares which correspond to the grid on my little pattern. Using the squares as a guide I approximate the paths of the vine stems in each square foot, mark which little squares will be dark, and tape them together to make the larger, true sized pattern. Once they are set together and any stray stems have been joined or corrected, I use the little pattern as a suggestion about where to put the leaf shapes. As I was fiddling with the preliminary pattern I had decided that the leaves should all be the exact (well sort of exact) same shape and size, playing a little game between naturalistic plant growth and simple graphic shapes. This might not work, but I probably won't know until it is done. Anyway, I now cut out a plain leaf shape from stencil plastic and draw around it over and over until the big pattern looks something like the small one, with vines and leaves and grids.
The last step is to copy the taped paper conglomeration onto polyester pattern material. This makes the pattern into something more stable, and easier to handle. I can pin or baste it onto the linen to keep it from moving around as I trace it onto the cloth. There is a lot of tracing involved in all of this, but now the pattern is re-usable. I hope it will be something I will want to re-use.