Sewing Again! Napkins! - June 2011

Above you can see the first napkin I made.  It is a smaller napkin, about 18 inches, so I guess you might call it a lunch napkin.  My larger dinner napkins barely made 22 inches each.  I came out with 4 lunch napkins and 7 dinner napkins.  The material... an old sheet.  Yeah, that's right, I reused our old sheets.  Don't worry, though, because they were all cleaned very well before I ever cut them down.

First, I cut off the edges so I can use the middle.  Second, I measured each side and figured out how many napkins I could make from it.  Third, I cut the individual napkin pieces, being sure to allow plenty of room for play and error.  Fourth, I folded the napkins into triangles to make perfect squares and trimmed the edges so they were more even.  Fifth, I ironed (with water) the edges down so they would stay where I wanted to while I was sewing.  Sixth, I sewed around the edges to make a border.

Folding and ironing the edges down made sewing the edges much easier.  Above is the first fold and below is the second fold.

I made several napkins, so I ended up taking pictures of the steps out of order... one day I will take pictures in an order that makes sense!  Above is the triangle folding of a dinner napkin.  The edge I trimmed down is closes to me (at the bottom of the triangle).  The other two sides are the same length (for you math types, that is an isosceles triangle!).  The reason this method of triangle folding makes a perfect square is because the material is folded in half along the diagonal twice.  This way, the triangle is only one-fourth the size of the square and only one edge of the triangle needs to be trimmed in order to trim all edges of the square.

Finally, the finished pile of napkins!  I am so excited to have these!  Now all I need is to make some more napkins with some of the other material I have laying around.  First, though, I need to make more grocery bags....

Enjoy and Blessings!!