There's a hole in my runner...

... dear Liza, dear Liza. Does anyone else remember that song?

Anyway, my table runner had, rather unfortunately, developed a hole. I made it before I had a rotary cutter and hence my rectangles weren't too neatly cut, and I hadn't much in the way of sewing skills back then! Despite its many imperfections this runner is very dear to me and so since the hole was bugging me, I decided to try to fix it.

You can see where the fabric's not properly sewn together in the middle :(

As with many things in life, it had to get worse before it got better:

When it came to sewing the new, properly sized piece in place I found a neat 'trick' way of doing things. I sewed a proper seam between the blue and cream fabric, but simply slipped the edge of the blue underneath the purple:

I then sewed the purple down on top, as close to the edge as possible, to keep both the purple and blue fabrics in place, and added an extra quilting line on top of the blue.

Ta-da! Good as new. Machine-sewing the binding back on was a little tricky, but I managed. I tried out using hair clips to help with the hand-sewing part, which worked pretty well. You can just about see from the left of this photo that when I originally hand-sewed the binding on I hadn't understood that you were meant to slip-stitch so that the sewing couldn't be seen. I really love this about the runner, as I love many of the imperfections.

And so I have a non-holey table runner back :) Question is, do I do it all again to get rid of the candle-wax stain?!