Free Sample
The Complete Handbook of Tablecloths
Material selection, sizing, care, and professional buying strategy for restaurants, event planners, and serious home hosts
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: Understanding Tablecloths
A tablecloth is not a single product. It is a textile assembly whose real-world behavior is determined by four variables: the fibers it is spun from, the way those fibers are constructed into a fabric, the chemical and mechanical finishes applied after weaving, and the conditions of its use. A 100% cotton cloth from a banquet supply house and a polyester-cotton blend sold on a retail shelf look similar in a folded photograph. In service, they differ in how they drape over a rectangular table, how quickly they absorb a wine spill, how much they shrink in the first laundry cycle, and how many times they can be washed before a seam fails. Every claim in this handbook traces back to those variables. If you understand them, you can predict a tablecloth's performance before you buy it, and you can diagnose its failures after it has disappointed you.
What a Tablecloth Actually Is
In its most basic form, a tablecloth is a woven (or knitted) sheet of fabric sized to cover a table's top surface and drop over the edges. But the word "fabric" obscures more than it reveals. The same fiber can be spun into yarns of varying thickness and strength; the yarns can be arranged in a tightly packed plain weave or a looser, more decorative construction at half the density. These structural choices are measured numerically. The weight of a fabric is expressed in grams per square meter (GSM) or ounces per square