Embroidered Napkins

Some friends of mine are holding a baptism for their infant daughter and throwing a party afterwards.  This is a major event and they were wanting to have party favors that their friends could take home to remember the event.  They settled on embroidered napkins for the party favors.

The first consideration was how many napkins and what size and type.  Based on the guest list for the party, they estimated that 40 napkins would be about right.  They wanted very traditional linen napkins, however these proved to be unobtainable for any reasonable price.  In the end, my fabric stash yielded up enough linen to make 8 napkins for special guests, such as the priest and Godparents, and we settled on polyester/cotton napkins already made for everyone else.  Those napkins came in packages of 1 dozen, so I made 36 cotton napkins.

Next was the discussions about what sort of design to use.  The sheer number of napkins involved meant that a relativelty quick stitching design with few color changes would be highly desirable.  A large, dense design doesn't work well on napkins anyway.

A long search turned up this lovely vintage wreath of daisies.  As an added bonus, the daisy is the girl's birth month flower.  To personalize the design, her initials were added to the center of the wreath.  Using the Floriani Total Control embroidery design software allowed me to add the initials and then change the order of the sewing so that the pink initials are sewn right after the pink flowers, rather than after the whole wreath is finished, avoiding one color change.

 The resulting design fits nicely on the folded napkin.  Because the design is sewn to a napkin, there's a desire to have no stabilizer left on the back side.   A tear away would be a mess, with all the small areas in the flower pedals, so a water soluble stabilizer is needed.  The design has to be so close to the edge that the napkin itself isn't firmly help by the hoop.  Instead, the stabilizer is firmly held by the hoop and the napkin is firmly pinned to the stabilizer.  It's necessary to pin the two outside the area of the design.

After a serious workout of my embroidery machine, then washing the napkins to remove the remaining stabilizer, then ironing the napkins, here's the whole set, gathered all together.  The linen napkins are the stack on the right.

Epilogue: The party was a marvelous success and the guests departed with their souvenir napkins.

Come back next week for another embroidery project from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.