Mitered-corner napkins

Napkins in a jiffy!

I love cloth napkins. I use them all the time, for no special occasion. Yet guests are always terrified to use them. They are so easy to make, good for the environment and make an average meal or snack feel a little bit special.

Here is a quick and easy way to make napkins with nice mitered corners. Next week, we’ll make place mats with coordinating prints to go with these napkins for a full-on, fancy-pants dining experience.

Supplies

(Click fabrics for direct links for purchase at Warehouse Fabrics Inc.)

Boston Sailor (BONSAR)
One yard is plenty for 4-6 napkins, each cut at 17″x17″.

The pattern

I cut my napkins 17 inches square. You can make them whatever size suits you.

The process

Press edges in	Start by pressing in your edges 1/4″ all the way around. Work counter-clockwise. Then, turn them in one more time in the same way, 1/4″. All raw edges should be encased. Your corners are a bit bulky, but no biggie because we’re going to do some work on them now.
Open up corner	Open up your corner and examine the pressing lines. I went over them in pencil to the left so you could see.
Draw a line	Using a ruler, draw a diagonal line as shown.
Trim off corner	Cut across the diagonal line.
Press down corner	Now press the diagonal edge over to the corner crease below it.
Fold sides back in	Refold on your original pressing lines, forming a nice mitered corner. Please click the photo for a close-up. Do this on all four corners.
Sew all the way around	Sew all the way around, close to the folded edge. I preferred to sew from the wrong side so that I could see where my mitered corner folds were and pivot right on that point.
Inside view	View from the back. Ummm … can you believe how easy that was? I told you! And I don’t care what my paper-towel-using husband says, cloth napkins clean your hands a whole lot better.

Other views

(Click for bigger views)

Let's eat!

Tags: Home Decor, napkins, sewing, sewing tutorial, tutorial

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Home Decor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.