Tutorial: Hemming Cloth Napkins

Last month, I sewed up several sets of cloth napkins for my oldest daughter's "Green Team" Earth Day Fair.

The napkins were a fast and easy way to reduce my fabric stash, so I thought I'd share this tutorial with other fabric addicts to help reduce both their stash and their trash! These napkins are cute and casual with tidy mitered corners. There are lots of other good napkin tutorial out there. I adapted techniques from this tutorial to make my napkins.

MATERIALS

*Prewashed cotton fabric
*Clear ruler
*Water soluble fabric marker
*Awl or seam ripper
*Rotary cutter
*Pins
*Scissors

Not pictured
*Cutting Mat
*Rotary Cutting Ruler
*Iron
*Sewing Machine
*Thread to match (or contrast, if you're so inclined) your napkins

CUT OUT YOUR NAPKINS

The napkin pictured above is a 12 inch square. This technique uses a 1/2 inch hem allowance so my finished napkin is an 11 inch square. Feel free to change your dimensions as dictated by your napkin needs. I recommend using a rotary cutter, but scissors will due in a pinch.

MARK THE HEM ALLOWANCE

Using the water soluble fabric pen and the clear ruler, mark a line 1/2 inch in from the edge. Repeat on all sides of the napkin.

CLIP THE CORNERS

To reduce bulk when you miter the corners, clip the corners using the marks you just made as the start and ending points of your cut.

PRESS THE HEM PART I

Carefully fold the edge of the fabric up to the marked line and press with a hot iron. Repeat on all sides.

MITER THE CORNERS

Now it's time for the fun part: mitering the corners.

At one corner, open up the fold on Side B.

Carefully fold Side A along the marked line, enclosing the raw edge.


Fold the corner down, lining up the folded edge from Side A with the marked line on Side B. I found my awl very helpful for the following maneuvers because I've got chunky fingers. If you don't have an awl, a seam ripper works well, too.



Refold Side B to the marked line, making sure to keep your corner folds tidy. Again, I would have been lost without my awl to help with this.


Finally, fold Side B along the marked line, enclosing the raw edge. Isn't that a pretty miter?

Pin the miter in place.

PRESSING THE HEM PART II

Continue around the napkin, mitering the corners and folding along the marked line to finish the hem. I like to press the hem again after the final fold, although if I'm in a slap-dash mood, I'll just pin the final hem in place. You can also try pressing both hem folds before mitering the corners. It didn't work out so well for me because the extra folds interfered with my miters but you may have much more nimble fingers than I do and end up with great results.

SEWING THE HEM

Starting in the middle of a side, begin top-stitching the hem. I stitch about 1/8 inch from the fold.

SEWING THE CORNERS

Keeping the miter in place while sewing it is a bit fiddly.

Hopefully you can see how I use my awl to keep the miter in place while it moves closer to the sewing machine needle.

Sew until your needle makes its first entry into the miter. Leave the needle in the fabric and pivot the napkin.


Here's my awl, again. This time it's gently pushing the fabric under the presser foot until there is enough fabric for the feed dogs to do their job. Be very careful, though, to keep your awl or seam ripper away from your sewing machine needle. My awl strayed too close once and the sewing machine needle shattered. (Stray bits of needle can really spoil a nice spaghetti dinner.)

Here's what the miter looks like from the back.


And here it is from the front.

Continue sewing around the napkin until you reach the beginning of your stitching, make a few back stitches, clip your threads and you're done!


Here are some of the sets I made for the Earth Day Fair:


And here is the pledge my daughter wrote for her Green Team:

I promise now,
I make my pledge,
To turn off lights
And do what's right.
We encourage now
The human race
To make the world
A better place.

Let me know if this tutorial worked for you or if you have any questions. And Happy Belated Earth Day!

Crafting in Colorado

One of the stops on my big trip was a visit to my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. I got to spend time with my family, eat lots of my Mom's delicious cooking and see my best pal who recently returned from a Foreign Service tour in Sudan.

And I got to try something new! My mom, who is a crafter extraordinaire, had her spinning wheel out and I got to spend some time with it. (Do you know how hard it was to not type, "take it for a spin"?)

I've always been fascinated by spinning wheels. I remember watching Disney's Sleeping Beauty with rapt attention when she was inexorably drawn toward her slumbering fate but I was much more interested in the spinning wheel than the princess. And spinning wheels have such lovely anatomical names like "maidens" and "mother-of-all" and "the footman." So after finally figuring out the scotch tensioner, I sat down to spin. It was quite tricky and an awful lot like learning to drive a stick shift (although I didn't crash into a gas pump my first time out alone-TRUE STORY!)

Here's my results:


Definitely what on author diplomatically called "novelty yarn". I'm not sure it is knit-able but it was delightful to spin. I think I need to practice more with my drop spindle before my next trip to Colorado.

Crafty Saturday-Fun With Koolaid

I've been itching to try my hand at dying wool and felting . So last Saturday, the kidlings and I tried dying wool with Koolaid. It was lots of fun and very cool. We adapted these instructions from www.knitty.com with great success. Here are our supplies:

Wool, Lemon-Lime, Tropical Punch and Grape Kool-Aid, misc kitchenware, water and a microwave (not pictured)

After soaking the wool in warm soapy water and getting kind of sticky mixing the Kool-Aid, we plunked our wool into the dye baths:

So bright!

We microwaved each dye bath in 2 minute increments. The purple and green took about 6 minutes each, the red took about 8 minutes. We knew we were done when the bath water was clear:

Isn't it amazing how clear the water is after the wool has sucked up the dye?

We let the wool cool a little bit and then took it out to dry.

Next time we'll use gloves

And here's the final product:

Success!

Next up: Felting!!

Another Crafty Saturday

This Crafty Saturday display is courtesy of my oldest daughter.


My kidlings spend a fair amount of time in my sewing studio rummaging through my big box of scraps. This Fairy Quilt is the latest result of their fabric forays. I love seeing bits and pieces of my bags in their creations. I'm also pleased that the kidlings like to sew - hopefully I'm following my mother's example and giving them a love of crafting!

Musings on Motherhood

Happy Mother’s Day! As I’m getting ready to go out and celebrate the day, I’ve been pondering motherhood. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Things I learned from my mother
(photo circa 1968)

-Crafting is a vital part of life.
My mom taught me to incorporate crafting into my everyday life. She is amazingly talented and in my lifetime has successfully mastered sewing, knitting, tolling, quilling, embroidery, crewel-work, line-drawing, rug hooking and quilting.

-Listen with attention and compassion.
As a kid I noticed that everybody wanted to talk to my mom because of her great capacity to truly listen and care about people.

-Aways take oranges when you visit someone for the first time.
Especially if they are Chinese. My mom worked diligently to teach my sister and me good manners. I don’t always behave properly, but that’s due to my failings and not my mother’s.

Things I’ve learned as a mother

-It’s true. The laundry is not going to do itself.

-Hugs and kisses from my daughters make inevitable stickiness worthwhile.

-Mothering has made me a better (albeit sometimes grumpier) person.

Things I hope to teach my children

-It’s better to be kind than nice.

-It’s better to be stylish than fashionable.

-That they are wonderful, special and incredibly important people. But not more so than anybody else.

I hope everybody has a lovely Mother's Day!