If my childhood home’s table didn’t have a cotton table runner, it had a hand-crocheted lace doily—so why am I so conflicted about tablecloths?

I come from a family of weavers. I remember my maternal grandmother’s loom in the old outdoor sauna at her farmhouse, where she wove rugs, curtains, table linens, and even the fabric for a national costume skirt. When she was young, she even grew her own flax for the fabrics she wove. Her approach to home design carried on.

Every year, my mother spent several of her vacation days weaving at a crafts advisory workshop. She created nearly all the paper yarn and cotton rugs in our childhood home, as well as sheer linen curtains, tapestries, shawls, and more. If the table didn’t have a traditional table runner, it had a crocheted lace doily she’d made herself. Incidentally, one of her peat fiber rugs from the 1970s later ended up in an exhibition at the Kuopio Museum.

Given that background, my mother had me at the loom by the time I was six—even though my feet could barely reach the pedals—and I slammed the beater with all my might. My first project was a cotton yarn tablecloth, though it ended up being used more often as a sauna bench cover. Next, I wove traditiona Finnish poppana cloths, which I quickly got my fill of. My final creations were two cotton jersey rugs for my student apartment.

Given my craft heritage, I’ve had a conflicted relationship with textiles as an adult. For a while, I didn’t even use a bedspread, and I’ve gradually cut back on curtains year by year. My mother probably finds it odd that there’s no rug under my dining table and no curtains in my living room. I suppose this is what you’d call a stripped-down style.

Above all, my relationship with tablecloths has been the most tumultuous. I think I gave the poppana cloths back to my mother fairly soon after I moved out.

Just the thought of a shiny, colorful oilcloth in a student apartment makes me shudder. Yet when my kids were little, I actually returned to a slightly more stylish oilcloth. That’s when a matte PVC tablecloth featuring Marimekko’s Lumimarja pattern saved me time on cleaning and protected my dining table. In that stage of life, using any other type of tablecloth would have been little more than a fleeting thrill. I did place a long red linen cloth on the table at Christmas, but I rolled it away from the toddler’s end during mealtime chaos. Maybe it was precisely the mess of life with young children that made me swear off tablecloths altogether.

When I was younger, I sometimes used narrow table runners down the center, but they started to feel incomplete. For years, I followed an all-or-nothing approach: I either left my dining table as a bare wooden surface or covered it completely with a solid-color tablecloth, and only for special occasions. That’s why laying out a cloth still feels like a celebration.

After visiting Japan, I learned to think differently: you can place a table runner across the width of the table! My grandmother would have made them herself, but I popped over to the linen shops in Tallinn and bought three narrow pink-hued runners for a six-person table. I also sewed white versions from panel curtains that had shrunk in the wash.

Ironically, though my kids’ messes once kept me from using tablecloths, the situation has reversed. Now I often spread a large linen cloth on my table for both everyday meals and special occasions—because it conveniently hides the fact that my ash tabletop could use a fresh round of finishing. I removed the kids’ marker stains with baking soda, but it also stripped some of the tinted wax. About halfway through the week, I flip over my Osmankäämi cloth from Lapuan Kankurit, and on Fridays, I toss it in the wash.

I haven’t touched a loom in more than a quarter century, but the skill has seeped into my DNA. Maybe it’s time to make my 95-year-old grandmother proud and get my teenage daughters to weave traditional poppana cloths of their own?