Sewing desk cover

My sewing desk is in a nook near our front door. The entry area and adjacent stairs are tiled, the walls are rendered brick and there is little in the way of soft furnishings, which means there's not much to absorb machine noise. To reduce noise, I have been using a towel under my machines, but it's annoying, catches lint/thread etc and is ugly.

(The rest of the area doesn't look too hot either)

So for a while now I've been wanting to make a padded cover for the desktop. Yesterday I decided that I was unlikely to actually make the cover if it required buying the padding/quilted fabric, ordering nice quilting fabric for the top, preparing it, etc.. So I pulled out some calico I had lurking in a box, cut it to size, overlocked the edge, sewed a casing around the edge and threaded through some thin elastic. Done.

Since it's just a single layer of calico I still needed to put a towel underneath, but it's functional and even though it's plain it does look neater.