Mitered Corner napkins

As promised, here are the mitered corner napkins I made using some leftover cotton fabric. These are my favorites and for our family, I think the smaller size works best.  We use them to wrap breakfast to eat on the road, and they are small enough for children to manage at regular mealtimes.  The bigger ones seem to end up knocking over milk cups... which kinda defeats the purpose of using napkins... mess prevention.

On the larger, dinner sized napkin, the central square measured 18" and the border is 2" wide.  It took about 1/3 yard 45" fabric in order to make this border, 2 strips, each cut 5" wide.
The smaller napkins are cut 10 1/2" with a 1 3/4" border.  I chose this size because I could get 4 napkins out of  1/3 yard of 44" fabric.  And I'm not sure how much yardage I used for the borders, but it took about 1 1/4 strips to make one small napkin.

Here's how I cut my small napkins:

Cut your central square whatever size you'd like.  In this case 10 1/2".  1" of this will be your seam allowances. (1/2" each side)

Cut your strips adding 4 times the length + twice the finished border width for each corner.  The width of the strip should be twice the depth of the border + 1".  For mine, it's 4 1/2"... 1 3/4" + 1 3/4" + 1" = 4 1/2"

Sew the strips together and press open your seam., then press the edges up 1/2" on both sides, and fold in half, matching edges and press flat.

Now, make the corners.  It's a bit hard to explain this, but you open your border and use the fold lines to construct your miters.  To make those miters, fold your border piece right sides together, matching the folds.
Then measure the width of your finished border  (1 3/4" here) along the top and bottom fold lines.  Mark.  Connect these marks to the center fold, forming a "V"... this forms the mitered corner when you're finished. Sew from one mark, up to the tip of the V, then down to the bottom mark. 

The measurement from corner to corner at the beginning of each V is 9 1/2"(see picture above).

Here's a close up.  The measurement from the vertical folded edge on the left side to the little mark where the start of the V is measures 1 3/4".  This is where you start sewing.  Don't sew into the seam allowances.

Trim the corners and close off the border.  From V to V on my napkin, it measure 9 1/2".

 Turn and press, making sure the folded edges match.  Now you've got a nice frame to work with.

Pin the center piece in, sandwiching it between the border edges.

 Sew it in.

The nicest detail here is the stitching used to sew the border on.  I used one of the decorative stitches on my machine and it came out looking very nice.  It also assured that the border on the opposite side would be caught in the sewing, even if I was slightly off.

And that's all folks!   Oh...  if you want the napkins to look good on both sides, simply double your center fabric and place them wrong sides together.  Nice!   These would make a great hostess gift for the holidays...  Gonna have to dig through my stash and see if I have some nice holiday prints! 

Cloth Napkins - Simple ones

Okay... I'm a fabric hoarder.  I have so many scraps that are just large enough to make something useful from, but not large enough for garments or the big home dec stuff I want.  But some of these pieces are just big enough for a set of small cloth napkins.  Yeah... I'd like bigger dinner sized ones but these'll work and my Chinese blood feels good about not wasting fabric.  And it only took about 30 minutes for a set of 4.

So here's a quickie tutorial on how I got these done...
First tip... I used barkcloth scraps.  You can easily see the crosswise AND lengthwise grain making cutting really quick.  These were leftovers from a set of curtains I made for a client.  She lets me keep the scraps when the customer doesn't want them back, which is why I accumulate so much fabric... hmmmm... Anyway, here's a link to her webshop, the stuff is perfect for home dec things if you like that tropical look.  Barkcloth Hawaii.

So cut your napkins 1" bigger than your finished size.  Mine turned out to be just under 12".  A bit small, but it's what I have to work with.  Then fold over and press two opposite sides 1/4", and again, 1/4".  It should look like this.

Next, fold and press 1/4" and 1/4" again on the two other sides.  It'll look like this when it's ready for sewing.

Yup... that was the hard part.  Now all you need to do is sew.  I used the edgestitch foot and just sew all the way across on all four sides.

Simple enough eh?  So now you can go green and stop buying all those paper napkins... unless someone likes to blow their nose in it... eww.. yeah... he can use the paper towels instead.