Sewing: Double Sided Napkins

Whew! What a busy week it has been around here! Remember how I told you I am redoing our windows outside? Well, it has been quite the project and I have been working on it non stop. Which has caused any other fun projects to fall by the wayside. This week I was especially working against a deadline because I had to remove all the panes in the large window in the kitchen. For 3 days we didn’t have any glass in our window. We kept covering it with plastic through the night to hopefully keep out the bugs. Once the panes were removed, I had to clean up the window, prime the frame, and put them back in. I thought putting them back in would be the easy part. Oh no. I was having trouble putting the glazier’s points back in place without breaking the glass. Not to mention I had already broken some panes while taking them out, now I was breaking them when replacing them. I ended up breaking 10 panes out of 24 and had to order some new glass. We are now waiting on the last four panes to be cut to size and we will pick them up and I can install them. And I hope I don’t break anymore :) Thankfully, glass is cheap. What a project this has turned into! Good news though, this should be the only window that I actually have to remove the panes from. This particular window had mildew under the glass which is why I had to remove them all so I could clean it up. None of the other windows have that problem. I am so thankful for that or I would start to feel very discouraged. Instead, I am envisioning how nice it will all look when it is done :)

Today is the first day all week I have taken a break from my window project. You can imagine how dirty the house was (especially the kitchen) after a week of sanding and paint scraping. So today was house cleaning day. It’s probably one of the few times that cleaning was fun. It allowed me to put my project on pause and boy was I ready for a break! So now that the house is on its way to being clean, I figured I would blog and try and get caught up here too.

Enough rambling… let’s move forward onto more exciting topics. Like napkins. Surely that is more exciting, right?!

Several weeks ago I saw some napkins at Target that were double sided. I thought they were so cute and I couldn’t get them out of my mind so I decided to make some of my own (big surprise!). I gathered some fabrics from my sewing room and got to work. I figured I would make it easy and keep them small. I made the pattern 12 x 12 and used a scrapbook paper as a template.

I cut out squares from each of my fabrics using my pinking shears, cutting 2 different fabrics for each napkin.

Next, I placed them in pairs, right sides together and sewing around all four sides except for a few inches in the middle on one side. You can kind of see it in the photo where I left it open.

Then I snipped the corners and turned it right side out and ironed it flat.

Lastly, I ironed the opening to match the rest of it and then sewing all around the outside, sewing the opening shut. Super easy, right?!

I wanted to use lots of different prints for fun. Look how cute they are!

Stripes and florals together are wonderful.

Since they are double sided, when I create a place setting I want both sides to show. Here is how I used them. Fold the bottom up first…

Then flip it over and fold one side over.

Then fold the other side over and flip it back to the front.

Ta-da! You have created a little pocket for the silverware. And, even better, you can show off both patterns at the same time.

I think they all look pretty cute :)

I have already used them when we had some friends over last week. And the best part is, since none of them match, it’s easy to add more to my collection if I end up needing more than 8. Even though I completely adore stripes, I think my favorites are the floral on floral. So fun!

And that concludes my week. One of these days I will get around to posting my Instagram photos again. I sort of can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve posted them. I haven’t even been taking very many of them lately. I guess when you are doing the same thing every day (i.e. scraping paint), there isn’t much new to report :)

I hope you all have a fabulous weekend. I know I will because I am taking the whole weekend off from my windows. I’m not even going to think about them :) Haha!