Bureau and table covers should be so made that they can be sent to the wash once a week. This cannot be done when muslins with dainty laces and ribbons are used. Rib- bons, for all the daintiness which they suggest, belong only to the bedrooms of the rich, who can afford to throw them away the moment that they have lost their freshness .
Tempting, therefore, as they are, they should be avoided by the girl of moderate means. Much better and more enduring effects may be attained by the use of drawn or embroidered linen covers, which are made to fit the tables.
A fine bird’s- eye makes a pretty cover, trimmed with a narrow, fluted ruffle of white cambric or linen lace. A fine white linen, embroidered with the owner’s monogram, and trimmed with white lace, or finished with a hem-stitch or scallop, always suggests the careful and fastidious housekeeper. Dutch, Hungarian, and German embroideries are good.
Dotted muslin covers trimmed with wash lace are very dainty for tables and bureaus. An enameled bed trimmed with dotted muslin and lace to match in a room with a flowered paper is very lovely. The valance and the spread are both made over a color, and the pillows sometimes having separate covers, also of the dotted . muslin, and sometimes merely hidden under the cover. The bedspread, by-the-way, should be cut at the two lower corners, so as to be pulled straight around the posts.
A Corner Dressing-Table:
A very pretty dressing-table for the corner of a girl’s room is to be adjusted with creativity as it is built up on a sugar barrel, which is thirty inches high and twenty- four inches across at the widest place. When it is inverted, screws or nails can be driven through the bottom to hold the triangular ledge or table-top in place. Three boards should be cut to form a quarter of a circle thirty inches long on the two straight sides.
The sweep, or curved edge, is one-quarter of a five-foot circle. Fig. 4 A also shows how this quarter-circle is placed on the top of the barrel. To keep the boards together, two battens thirty inches long are nailed or screwed underneath the straight edges. Screws rather than nails should be used in fastening the quarter-circle to the barrel.
They will not pull out or work loose so readily as nails.
The canopy top is supported on a framework consisting of three sticks, each three feet long, and a triangular top made of three short sticks.
At the top the sticks are joined as shown in B, and the lower ends are attached to the table-top with long, slim, steel- wire nails. If the color scheme of the room is pink, pale-green, or canary color, this same color may be carried out in the drapery. Sateen or colored cotton goods may be overlaid with a dotted swiss or scrim, and tacked to the framework. At the bottom a valance is made and caught to the circular edge of the ledge, which is covered with gimp held by brass-headed tacks.
The upper sticks of the frame are bound with strips of white muslin before the drapery is attached. This is to prevent the wood from showing through the goods, and also to make an anchorage in which some stitches can be taken, if necessary, to hold the canopy drapery in place.
For this top it will be necessary to have two swiss or thin scrim coverings, between which one thickness of the colored material is laid. Both sides of the drapery will be seen, and it is necessary to show the colored goods on both sides. A shirred band of the goods may be arranged along the top stick of the canopy, and bows at the corners of the top and the edge will add to its appearance.
An oval or square mirror in a white or light enameled frame can be suspended by wires from the top