Napkins
I apparently have a slight reputation for being a little hippie, crunchy, love-mother-earth. When I had visitors helping this summer after my knee surgery, someone expressed astonishment that we didn’t use cloth napkins on a regular basis. I had big plans for cloth napkins, but an 18″ napkin, double-sided, becomes quite an investment in fabric.
When the local quilt store announced it was going out of business and had everything on deep discount, I found myself reconsidering napkins, this time in a Farmer’s Market sort of theme. Some may say I have a bit of a thing for the Farmer’s Market, too.
These were going to be simple napkins. One yard each fabric, 4 napkins each fabric, so I was going to have 16 napkins. I wasn’t going to hem them or make them double-sided, as that would clearly be crazy. I had seen a blog somewhere where they stitched a line around the edge and allowed the napkins to fray naturally, and I thought “Oh, THAT is doable!” So I ripped my fabric into 4 pieces along the grain line and was all set to wash and stitch them, when I decided 18″ x 22″ is kind of large for a napkin, especially for an every day sort of thing, especially for the kids. And with all this fabric I had, I could easily make four times the number of reasonably sized napkins.
So I very carefully tore the rest of the fabric into approximate 9″ x 11″ rectangles. They didn’t need to be exact, right? (Stop laughing.) I could deal with slightly askew napkins. These were a casual affair!
New fabric is full of starch and sizing and other Stuff that makes it not so good at absorbing things like yogurt, coffee, and spaghetti sauce, so I tossed all the napkins in the wash to get them fresh and ready to add the stay stitching.
This is what emerged.
Not exactly the idyllic stack of handsome eco-friendly napkins I had seen in my dreams, lemme tell ya. And really? 64 napkins? Even MY kids aren’t that messy (I only require a few more than they do). After a few uses, it was apparent that a single thickness of fabric really wasn’t going to work, and that whole “frayed” look wasn’t going to fly, either.
I decided to stitch 2 of the so-called napkins together, which would leave me with 32 double-sided, Farmer’s Market inspired cloth napkins.
I started with the tomatoes, stitched them together in pairs, desperately ignoring the uneven seams, clipped the corners (with the help of the cat there), and turned them inside out (Amazing Race was awesome tonight, btw).
I even managed to get the first one pressed and top-stitched! Pressing those seams is going to take more patience than I have tonight, so the rest of the tomatoes, oranges, blackberries, and green beans will have to wait until after the ice cream and some sleep.
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