Cloth Napkins You'll Actually Use

By the end of this hour you will have four cloth napkins with clean, square, mitred corners — the kind you put on a table and then keep glancing at. Napkins are the best possible first machine project because every seam is straight, nothing has to fit a body, and the only difficulty is a corner trick that looks like tailoring and takes about ninety seconds once you have done it once.

This is a Level 1 project: your first real machine seams. If your machine is still in the box, start with how to thread a sewing machine and come back.

What you need

Pins or clips help but are not required — pressed folds mostly stay put on cotton.

Cut list

A standard metre of 44-inch-wide quilting cotton gives you four squares with a little to spare.

• Cut 4 squares, 19-inch by 19-inch.
• Hem allowance: 1-inch on every edge — folded as two half-inch folds, not one.
• Finished size: 17-inch square, a normal dinner napkin.

If your fabric is 60-inch wide, or you bought 1.2 metres, cut 20-inch squares instead for an 18-inch finished napkin. Nothing else changes.

Cut on the straight grain, parallel to the selvedge, or the napkins will go slightly diamond-shaped in the wash. If you are unsure which way is straight, snip the edge and tear a strip — cotton tears along the grain and shows you the line.

Steps

Press the hems (20 minutes for all four)

1. Press a half-inch fold to the wrong side on all four edges. Do all four sides before you fold anything twice. Use the ruler to check the first few inches of each edge, then eyeball the rest — your eye is better than you think.
2. Press a second half-inch fold on all four edges. The raw cut edge is now hidden inside the fold. This is a double-fold hem, the same structure you would use to hem a pair of trousers — learn it here, on something flat, where nothing is round or on the bias.
3. Unfold everything. You now have a grid of creases, and each corner has a little square where the creases cross. That square is the whole trick.

Mitre the corners

A mitre is the diagonal join you see at the corner of a picture frame. On fabric it removes the bulk that would otherwise stack four layers deep.

4. Find the outer crease intersection at one corner — the point where the two outermost creases meet, half an inch in from each raw edge.
5. Fold the corner tip in diagonally so the fold passes exactly through that intersection point. Press it hard. You now have a triangle of fabric folded to the wrong side.
6. Trim the folded triangle back to about a quarter-inch from the diagonal fold. This is the bulk you are getting rid of. Do not trim past the fold line.
7. Refold both hems — half-inch, then half-inch again. The two folded edges will meet at a 45-degree line and the corner will lie flat and square. Press.
8. Repeat for the other three corners, then the other three napkins.

Sew

9. Fit a fresh universal needle if your machine has been sitting. Machine needles are consumable — a dull one skips stitches and puckers a hem, and beginners almost always blame themselves instead of the needle.
10. Set a straight stitch, length around 2.5 to 3. Longer looks intentional on a topstitched hem; shorter looks fussy.
11. Start in the middle of one side, not at a corner. Corners are the hardest part to start on, and a mid-side start hides the join.
12. Sew about an eighth of an inch from the inner folded edge, all the way around. When you reach a corner, stop with the needle down in the fabric, lift the presser foot, pivot 90 degrees, drop the foot, keep going.
13. Overlap your starting stitches by about half an inch and backstitch two or three stitches to lock it.
14. Press the finished napkin one more time and admire the corners.

Repeat three times. The fourth napkin will be visibly better than the first, and that is the actual product of this hour.

When it goes wonky

A seam ripper undoes any of the above in about a minute. Unpicking is a normal part of sewing, not evidence of failure.

What you just learned

• The double-fold hem — the single most reused finish in sewing. It is on trousers, curtains, tote tops, tea towels and shirt tails.
• Mitred corners — the professional-looking finish for any hemmed square: placemats, table runners, quilt borders, blanket edges.
• Pivoting at a corner with the needle down — the manoeuvre behind every bag, cushion and pocket you will ever sew.
• Topstitching at a consistent distance from an edge — the skill that makes home-sewn things stop looking home-sewn.

If you enjoyed the pressing more than the sewing, the placemats project in the library is the same technique at a bigger scale. If you want to move on, the pillowcase project introduces enclosed seams. Either way, see what else sits at your level on the Threader page, or browse what to sew first for the full beginner order.