Sunday, September 12, 2010

Adventures in sewing: Cloth napkins

My first sewing project was a success! I made a set of eight cloth napkins. They turned out great! They are perfectly imperfect and I'm ecstatic.


Sewing requires way more ironing than I was anticipating, but I'm starting to get used to it...even though I try to avoid ironing like the plague. Fold the hem...iron...fold the hem again...iron...unfold the hem...iron...fold the corner...iron...refold the hem...iron. I, of course, amended the ironing instructions to make them more efficient. :)

I cut the fabric into squares and decided that as long as they all looked similar in size I wasn't going to stress out about accuracy.


I did the folding and the ironing, then the sewing with one of the fun stitches on my machine. I don't know if the fun stitches should be used for holding things together, but I guess we'll find out. I decided to use contrasting thread to make the napkins a little more interesting.  My corner stitches weren't perfect, but most of them weren't terrible. I found two different ways for stitching corners and tested them both (I considered mitering the corners, but that requires precision and that's not high on my priority list at the moment).

Stitching to the corner, then pivoting with the needle in the material (I discovered this is my preferred method):


Stitching straight off the edge of the fabric (not a fan of this technique, but I'm sure I probably did it wrong):


My very first napkin:


Some of my good looking corners:



The napkins aren't perfect...not all the stitches are smooth, the lines aren't straight, they aren't exact measurements, some of the corners look really weird...but I'm proud of them! And the spool of thread was almost the exact amount that I needed. As soon as I finished the last napkin I looked at the spool and the bobbin and there were only a couple inches of thread left on each of them. It's a sign. I was meant to make cloth napkins. Ha.

Lizzy's typical location...napping on the back of the couch while I was sewing:


And the Buckeyes won today!!! O-H-I-O!!!

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