Virtage Gets Crafty: Orange blossoms: hand-painted tablecloth

I knew immediately what I wanted to offer my long time friend Cristian, when he announced he was going to get married soon...I knew how much he loves cooking and entertaining friends at home and how much he would have appreciated a hand-made present from me. Tablecloth it was.

He and his wife Francesca are talented architects (I was once one of them - but not so talented...), so they designed their own home's refurbishment. I noticed on the pictures they sent when they completed the works, a beautiful flowery theme above the kitchen table...so beautiful that they used it again for their wedding invitations, and so beautiful that I decided it was the perfect pattern for the present I had in mind!
So, well in advance of the wedding day (please note the well in advance) I cut a 120x120cm square on white cotton upholstery fabric; using a dimensional orange fabric paint with a pearl finish (to give the drawing some texture) I started painting a pattern of flowers on two opposite sides of the square. The paint is really super-easy to use as it can be held like a pen. Now, the difficult part was to reproduce in scale the flowers from the pictures and the wedding invitation...it took me a while, but the result on the tablecloth is pretty similar to the original flowers.
I wanted to give a double-face function to the tablecloth, so I've used a rich, thick orange cotton for the back. I was lucky it matches quite well with the flowers on the wall.

A slight hiccup in this story were the napkins...towards the end of the project I realised I didn't have enough orange fabric to make four square napkins - or time to buy more fabric (as usual, I ran out of time, in fact I ended up asking my mum for help to sew some of it and giving this present to my friends MONTHS after their wedding...).
My husband (by now you got why I married him) came up with an idea: "Why don't you make triangular napkins? People tend to fold napkins in two anyway!". So what looks like a brilliant designer idea was in fact pure serendipity!