My small but perfectly formed sewing room is upstairs, overflowing somewhat onto the landing, which luckily is pretty big! Our ironing board lives downstairs, so whenever I’m sewing I’m up and down those stairs every time I need to press something, which lets face it, is nearly  every seam!

A few months ago I saw an ironing table on facebook that someone had made from a TV dinner table. It was just what I needed. First find your wooden tv table…I finally found one for £12 at Poundstretcher, the only downside with this one is that I would have preferred one with a wooden top rather than melamine.

I looked through my stash and found a remnant of furnishing weight fabric, I bought it to make bags only to find it was one of those annoying script fabrics where the words don’t follow the grainline, very obvious on a square bag! It was just the right size to cover the table.

To pad the table I used one layer of fleece and two layers of quilting batting, it gives a nice firm but cushioned top. I turned it under and tacked it down with 1cm tacks. Melamine is hard! You know I never really realised the difference between hard woods and soft woods until I did upholstery, I learnt very quickly when trying to hammer tacks in!!! The corners were a bit fiddly as they are curved, I cut some of the bulk away and turned the corner in first before neatening up the sides.

Time will tell how secure the tacks are, as they didn’t all go in perfectly, if needed I might borrow my OH’s staple gun!

I used my new ironing table last night when I was doing some quilting and it was perfect, big enough and sturdy too. If I’m making a big garment I might still need the downstairs ironing board but this one is very handy. I even treated myself to a new iron for upstairs, purple of course! I decided I needed one with an automatic cut-off as I have a bit of a habit of forgetting it!