Handmade: Napkins

Pinterest is one of my big inspirations, it's such an easy and simple way to find examples of anything you want. One thing I spotted recently was hand embroidered napkins. I've very much been getting back into hand embroidery lately (check out my previous post for constellation embroidery), I find it's so easy to personalise something for your home with this technique and it's no where near as difficult as people think.

Before I made my napkins I did a little research to find out the best fabric for their purpose and settled on a natural coloured cotton linen blend. It's a thick fabric but sewable, and absorbent so hopefully it will wipe up any spills. (Plus I'm going to use the left over to make tea towels!) I got my material from eBay at Dottychic11.

These are really easy to make and you can match them to you colour scheme. Mine is a minty green!

I took my fabric and cut it into 10" by 20" pieces. To do this I used pinking shears all the way round which will stop the fabric from fraying on the raw edges. 

I then hemmed the edges of the fabric folding the corners into a neat point in the way shown in the pictures below. 

1.

 2. Next fold the fabric next to that over on both sides so as to create a sharp point.

4.

Pin this in place, from there fold the edges over by about a centimetre all the way around and pin in place. 

Sew along these edges with a simple stitch on your machine, careful with the corners as your machine might struggle so just take it slow and make sure to feed the fabric through carefully. If your machine can't handle these you can hand sew the corners and machine the rest.

Once your finished hemming you can decide on what you want to embroider on to your napkins.
I chose the word 'Yum' in a mint green embroidery thread, to go with my theme.
I lightly sketched on the word I wanted to embroider in the style I wanted and popped it in the embroidery hoop.

For my stitching I chose a split stitch something which is new to me but I think ended up looking quite good. 

For this you do a normal stitch first then come back up halfway through said stitch like in the picture above. Keep repeating this process as along all of your word. The final product should look something like below.

I am really pleased with the final product. I now have matching napkins that fit in my colour scheme and of course have that handmade look which I love. 

So get sewing! Hand embroidery is so much simpler than people think and looks impressive. Plus isn't it nice when someone asks where they came from and you can say they're all you! 

What do your napkins look like? 

Katy