On to the tablecloth!

Here’s one full repeat of the pattern I am using for the main lozenge in the center.  It’s one of the largest I’ve found.  Not the longest – several of the narrower strips beat it there, but certainly with length and width taken together the one with the largest area north/south plus east/west.

I am in the process of adding another panel of the main design (the section between the “ice cream cones”) left and right of what you see here.  Possibly two.  We’ll see how I feel about proportions after I’ve finished the initial center set.

And I decided to draft my own companion border for this panel, after looking through and discarding others in my collections.  While coordinating borders are less common compared to ones that have absolutely no relation to the design elements in the main panel accompanied, they do exist.  Here’s an example (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession 79.1.14):

I doodled up a couple of possibilities.  One didn’t make it off the drawing board.  The second I was more pleased with, and began trying it out:

But once it began to make the transition from paper to stitching, I decided I didn’t like the way it was turning out.  It’s too tight, dark, and linear.  Plus I don’t like the proportions against the main pattern.

So I will pick out this little bit of companion border, and go back to the drawing board.  The goal is something lighter, looser, with more white space.  And wider – probably twice the width of what I had doodled up before.