I’m finally back! I needed something small to ease back into posting as my last post was all the way back in April 🙁 This may be seasonally a bit late (as it is currently Fall) but this was a fun little project. My parents had brought me back a jelly roll from the Liberty of London store a few years ago. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a jelly roll, it is basically a sampler pack of prints that come in long, thin strips. Since there isn’t a lot of fabric in each print, it can be a bit tricky to use them. A lot of quilters use them to make scrap quilts but since I don’t currently care for quilting I had to think of something else. That’s when I remembered that Purl Soho had quite a few free napkin patterns and I thought I would give it a shot to use up this jelly roll!
Material and Method
Method
I chose to use the Purl Soho pattern: Molly’s Handmade Napkins. It used just the right amount of patterned fabric for tape instead of using larger amounts of printed yardage.
Material
I purchased some fabric for this project because I needed real yardage of a single base color. I purchased 3 yards of Purl Soho’s Spectrum Cotton in Orchid Gray and used the Liberty strips make the tape.
Construction Notes
Creating the Tape
The nice thing about this pattern is that the tape doesn’t need to be cut on the bias, which is perfect for the longer strips of Liberty fabric I had. After trying it a few different ways, I would recommend this order of operations:
- Cut fabric into 2″ strips.
- Sew those strips together.
- Run the new, really long strip through your bias tape maker and iron.
- Fold over your tape and iron your new single fold tape into double fold. Do not skip this step! This will make the edging even on both sides of the napkin and make sewing it onto the main fabric so much easier.
Pinning Tape
The pattern is very self explanatory. I would just emphasize that pinning in the perpendicular fashion show below works much better than running the pins parallel to the fabric. Lesson learned the hard way.
Final Thoughts
I love these! I had enough coordinating Liberty tape for 8 napkins. I’ve used them several times already and they wash and dry quite well. Since I still have more of the jelly roll to use, I’ll probably make another set that utilizes a different color scheme. Goodbye summer see you next year!
