Pages

Friday, April 13, 2012

Vintage sheet napkins make me happy

P1040477

I have collected a B-U-N-C-H of vintage sheets.  I love them and they make my heart sing!

I love to make pillows, pillowcases, quilts, table runners, jammies, and napkins with them.

I thought about selling napkins on Etsy, but they take me a bit to make and take a lot of fabric and are hard to photograph!  When I first started collecting my sheets, they were hard to come by and I thought the napkins took a lot of sheeting.  Now I have a lot of sheets and I am using the napkins for us!

Napkins are easy to make.  I use my 15” square ruler as a template and cut out 4 to 6 squares of two fabrics.  I like to pair a light/small print fabric and a larger printed one.  I sew right sides together and leave an opening to turn them right side out.  (My first napkins were made using my 20.5” square, but they were larger than I really needed.)

I do rip my sheets to find straight of grain and do my cutting off of those edges.  I hate all of those strings, but the sheets are often way off grain and I feel it is worth my time, and the amount of fabric waste, to end up with a quality finished product.

After turning the napkins right side out I press them carefully and stitch the turning hole invisibly shut.

The finishing touches are the 1/8” and 1/4” top stitching around all of the sides.  It gives them a nice tailored look.

The nice thing about my napkins are how soft they are on your face and how easy they are to launder!  If I have people over, I iron them, but just for us I just shake them out of the dryer and fold. 

I love them!

Robbie Marie

1 comment:

  1. I enjoy seeing how others make use of vintage sheets. I have a great 'stash' accumulated; occastionally I find new-in-package sheets that are vintage. Sheets have only recently become ridiculously high priced---people used to 'stock up' during so-called 'white sales', and that stuff can migrate to the very back of the linen closet---people don't know what they have until they pack up their house for a move. My other favorite thing is pure cotton 'tube' pillowcase fabric; it's seamless, and incredibly soft after laundering. Embroidered pillowcases etc. To find an un-embroidered pillowcase pair is the Cat's Meow!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you so much for taking your time to comment... I just hearing from you!