Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Summer Sewing ~ Napkins

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 It's summertime! Well officially anyway but in Oregon we are still kind of waiting for it to arrive. While I sit here drumming my fingers for that, I'm going to spruce up the patio table-scape with some fun new napkins. 
Summer napkins
The regular everyday napkins I made here are ok and holding up great after over a year’s worth of use. But I need brighter cheerier ones for summer.  So I've been on a mission to make some floral inspired ones for outside.  For these I used the Riley Blake fabrics from Millie’s closet which is a fun patchwork cheater print so I could make it single sided. Then I added a super wide border out of RB’s Chevrons.  These roughly follow Penny’s napkin tute except that mine have borders cut at 4.5” to make them wider so you can see more of the fun chevrons.  I cut the inside part of the napkin to 4 patches of the fabric which worked out to 11.75” and adjusted all my other measurements accordingly. I think they turned out pretty fun,
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I double top-stitched them on the front to ensure that the turned-under edge in the back was completely secured.  I don't like to hand-stitch if I can avoid it and for heavy-use items such as these, I think the machine bound seam is more secure.

I made another set out of another patchwork cheater print, from Holly Holderman.  Increasing the border to 4.5" makes this a great stash buster project.  ;)


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What fun summer projects are you working on?

Happy Sewing!

2 comments:

Deborah said...

These are adorable!!! Lovely!!

Bearpawquilter said...

Sure felt like summer to me. I was in Portland over the weekend for my son's wedding and it was very hot for those of us attending from Alaska where 70 is a hot day. I was working on the wedding quilt - a Queen Bento Box - black background and bright batiks. They really liked it. I will be working on the matching shams next. I would like to make a shout out to the band at the reception called Pressure Point. Really good. They played everything from 40's Big Band to the Black-Eyed Peas. If you need a band for an event in Portland, look them up! I danced with my son to Don't It Make my Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gayle. When it was popular on the radio he was about four and sang it riding in the car. We made it a fast trip. We had to get home to our new puppy - golden retriever - number four for us. Too cute.