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This might be of interest if you live somewhere with limited space but would like to have a good surface to lay over a table for playing card games or board games. It seems it's pretty common for people to buy a roll of baize to lay out like a table cloth for this purpose, but I thought this would skid around or be too easy to tug around accidentally, particularly if it overlaps the edge of the table. So, we stitched together pieces of baize and leatherette to produce a surface that's possible to roll-up for storage and also provides a static and smooth surface for playing games on.
To avoid having frayed edges, we folded the baize over every edge, added an extra crease in the overlap and stitched through all of those layers (3 layers of baize and 1 of leatherette).
The tricky bit about this project was getting the size of the baize right, since ironing creases into the edges shrinks the material around the outside. We tried to reduce this effect by ironing the baize all over before starting, and stretching out the baize before sewing the pieces together. There may be a better way of doing this, however.
To avoid having frayed edges, we folded the baize over every edge, added an extra crease in the overlap and stitched through all of those layers (3 layers of baize and 1 of leatherette).
The tricky bit about this project was getting the size of the baize right, since ironing creases into the edges shrinks the material around the outside. We tried to reduce this effect by ironing the baize all over before starting, and stretching out the baize before sewing the pieces together. There may be a better way of doing this, however.
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We bought 90cm by 130cm of baize and leatherette from John Lewis, allowing at least an extra 15cm in each dimension - the actual size of the materials we got were up to 10cm out, it turns out. You need the baize to be at least 6cm bigger in each dimension than the intended final size of the mat.
You'll also need some good scissors, a ruler, a measuring tape, tailor's chalk, an iron, a sewing machine and thread to match the colour of the baize.
You'll also need some good scissors, a ruler, a measuring tape, tailor's chalk, an iron, a sewing machine and thread to match the colour of the baize.
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Strangely, I think a comment disappeared from this thread asking about felt versus baize as a material for the surface. (I got an email with the comment but it never appeared here.) Anyway, our thinking was that felt would produce much more fluff after some use, but I don't know if that would be a real problem or not.
Yeah I deleted the comment since I already started.
That said, one option would be to stitch a grid into it, but that would be very time consuming and easy to get wrong - also with our sewing machine you could only really stitch round the edges. Perhaps it would be better to start with a material with a grid printed on it anyway, but I imagine it would be difficult to get baize pre-printed as such. You could just draw lines onto it with marker pen, but I think that would be difficult to do neatly, since you'd have to keep the baize under tension for drawing with pen.
Sorry I don't have any better ideas about that...
www.thedicetower.com/thedicetower/index.php
.http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3076/puerto-rico
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I've just added a top down picture of the setup for a 2 player game of Dominion, which shows the surface half unrolled - that's how we've used this most of the time due to lack of table space.