I have owned a nice tea set for several years now. Purchased in London, it has graced my table many times for tea parties with friends.
But I have never had napkins (or serviettes, as the English would say) to go with them. I was having a couple friends over for tea this week, and decided to finally do something about this problem. So I took a tea cup into the quilt shop with me to look for some suitable fabric. I found the light, pretty floral that you see in the photos below.
What follows is a little tutorial about how I made the serviettes. I decided to make these smaller than standard napkin size, so I cut 13" unfinished squares.
First step: fold under and iron a half-inch hem on each side. Then unfold the corners, and fold under a mitered corner. That bit of fabric folded on the diagonal is going to stick out beyond the hem I sew, so it needs to be trimmed off. I cut a little square our of each corner. Can you see it clearly in the photo below?
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| Mitered corner with protruding square cut out. |
Then I have a nice-looking corner like this.
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| Folded and pressed mitered corner, ready to turn and sew. |
Folding under again, right up to the pressed fold, will give me a nice 1/4" hem.
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| Hem edge turned under for a finished edge. |
I didn't need pins to sew the sides. I just finger-pressed my 1/4" hems and stitched along the inside edge.
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| Sewing the hem, right along the inside edge. |
The one place I did pin was at the corners, as there were a lot of edges to be held down there. I simply sewed up to the diagonal fold, took one stitch on the diagonal to move me over to the next hem, and continued on that side.
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| Coming up to the mitered corner, which I have pinned. |
And I end up with a nice-looking mitered corner like this one. You can see that this isn't my absolute best example, but even it's not bad.
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| Finished mitered corner. |
Here is one stack of serviettes, nicely pressed.
And don't you think they go well with my tea set?!?
