I saw a table runner online that someone made by taking a pack of 5” charm squares, dividing them into darks and lights, cutting them all in half diagonally, sewing the light triangles to the dark triangles, and then piecing them back together. It looked really cute. (I’d share the link if I could find the bookmark!)

But when I tried it with a charm pack from a very pretty fabric line, Grand Canal by Kate Spain for Moda…

… it didn’t turn out so well. It looked like chaos to me:

What to do? After some thought, I decided to try salvaging the project by putting sashing in between the squares made up of light/dark triangles, and some cornerstones using a lovely light green from my stash. And it completely changed it! Now I love it:

This was made from one charm pack, 1 1/2”-wide strips of white cotton scraps for the sashing, and part of a fat quarter for the cornerstones. I was surprised to find that just one charm pack plus sashing makes a table runner that’s 17″ wide and 70” long. Since that’s much longer than my table, I decided to turn it into a very long wall hanging in my sewing room. It looks really pretty there, and no one will ever spill gravy on it  🙂