How do you spend your Sundays?

I evidently spend mine embroidering turkeys. Here's one:

(Ignore the really horrible stabilizing job. And I'm still not sure that I'm quite happy with this one, I may be trying more.)

I've been thinking about holidays which makes me think about serving dinner which makes me think about the table. Because of the set up of this house, our formal dining room table did not make the move. You know, the one which my dozens of tablecloths fit. Our current dining room table is our former kitchen tables put together to form a square. A very large square. It is very difficult to fit any sort of tablecloth on a very large square table I've discovered. 

But a bare table just does not seem very festive for major holiday dinners, so I've decided that table runners are the way to go. They will provide some interest without trying to find a large enough cloth to fit the table in all the right ways. Plus, they are pretty easy to make, so I could do some fun ones as well as more formal ones. (Hence the turkeys.) They would also continue to be useful if some day in the future we can go back to using a more normal sized dining room table. 

It's also one small way that we can continue to feel more settled here. Family dinners have always been an important part of our family life, and often that also meant sitting down at a nicely dressed table. I've missed that in this house.

Complicating things even further is that we use the dining room table every day for school. It's hard to do school on a tablecloth, and assuming I could find that one fit, I didn't relish folding it up for school and then relaying it for dinner each day. It wasn't going to happen. Runners seem more manageable in that regard as well. 

I see quite a bit of quality time in my studio, using up fabric in my stash. Really this whole table runner-thing is just an excuse to hide away and sew.