Christmas Napkins

Every year, my family has a large Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. It's part of my dad's Polish heritage, and it always means Christmas to me.

As a result, we have at least 14 (usually more) friends and family to dinner. This year, we had sixteen. We cook huge amounts of food, and eat far too much. There is wine, and conversation, and it's always been one of my favourite nights of the year. It's as much about family as it is anything else. The celebration is traditionally a dinner that keeps vigil before midnight mass, but that isn't part of the tradition that we have ever followed.

This year, as part of our celebrations, I made napkins.

I got inspired by this post and  instructional pdf by craft sanity, which I originally found via craftgossip.

So, I worked out how much fabric I would need (and massively over estimated it, but hey, next year I have fabric ready to go, right?), found the fabric, and purchased it.

And then it sat in a bag in my room for months. And months.

Then, maybe a month before Christmas, I decided that in fact, I needed to start them, because that was a whole lot of little snips to make to have them sit flat.

I mostly followed the awesome tutorial, but I used a dinner plate for my circle shape. Placing right sides together, I cut both fabrics at the same time. I used a pen to trace around the plate, and then put like 3 pins in to hold the two fabrics in place, before cutting around the circle, about 1.5cm from the line I'd drawn. I then used the line as my stitch guide, and I actually got perfect circles that way.

In the end, I made 44 napkins - I gave 4 to my sister, 8 to my grandmother (with a matching apron for my grandfather), and that left 32 for my family.

You know what?

I didn't even take a photo of them, and now they're all packed up and put away with the rest of the Christmas linens, so I can't even give you a pretty photo of my work.