Vingt serviettes rayées

Once upon a time, I read a list of money saving tips that mostly made me roll my eyes--except for the suggestion of using...nay...making cloth napkins.  So I cut a bunch of 9 inch-ish squares from some weird calicoes I'd bought and regretted, serged the edges, and happily used those for a few years before thrifting nearly a dozen much prettier "real" cloth napkins (that had obviously never been used--I'll thrift a lotta things, but...not used napkins...)  After five and a half years, those napkins aren't so pretty any more. (Holes.  They have holes, lots of holes, and frayed edges.  I'm not being needlessly picky about light wear.)  So I decided to make new napkins.

I'd thrifted some yarn-dyed red striped twill that was trying to pretend it was ticking.  The red had already bled a bit by the time I got it, so I laundered it again in hot water and things didn't seem to get worse, so I...eventually...started snipping and ripping into squares.  Well...almost-squares.  The finished size is 11½" x 12½", because I don't like big flappy napkins, and because I was trying to get as many as possible from the yardage I had.  I ended up with 20.

I looked at the various methods for making mitered corners--lovely as they are, I really didn't want to fold--press--fold again--press again--unfold--trim diagonally--fold again--stitch--flip--press x 80.  The 'fake' mitered corner method seemed to have almost as many steps, and Nancy Zieman's super-cheaty method turned out not to be at all suitable for the cloth I was using.

So I just folded and folded again.  Here's a random corner of a random napkin, and it's not too atrocious

Well OK yes the stripes don't line up.  I didn't take the time to straighten the grain of these, because I wanted the project to be done more than I wanted it to be beautiful.

That happens.

That happens a lot.

But now I have 20 new napkins that actually fit the vague color scheme* I have for the kitchen and made from cloth I paid 99¢ for and the project is done so things're good.

Here's to going another five years before needing to think about napkins again.

*It's red-green-blue.  I said it was vague.