How to Sew Napkins with Mitered Corners - Learn to Sew Series

hey guys it's Melanie from MelanieKHam.com welcome back to my channel today's video another video in the Learn to Sew Series. We're gonna do napkin fabric napkins with a mitered corner that beautiful corner technique great for beginner sewers to know how to do and make something super useful while we're at it if you've been liking this series hit that thumbs up button and all the other videos in the series are gonna be linked for you down below as well as the supply lists and the written instructions and all that good stuff is there for you make it easy to find. Let's jump right in I'm gonna show you how to make fabric napkins. Alright let's get started with our napkins, and those mitered corners I'm gonna be using this like linen style fabric stripes this is 1 yard of fabric and I pre washed this. So whenever you're making things like aprons napkins things they're gonna be washed regularly you want to wash it ahead of time because then that will pre shrink it for you I did zigzag the egg washed it in the mesh bag on cold in the delicate cycle and then I put it in the dryer tumble dry low it's ready but it's very wrinkly as you can see so we want to press it over at the ironing board and just get it nice and easy to work with so that we can cut it. You don't want to cut fabric that's super wrinkled like this because you won't get an accurate cut. fabric is pressed and I've got it folded up so that my selvedge so the selvedge is the part of the fabric at the top and the bottom of the fabric and it usually kind of has this little fringe where the fibers are sort of coming out like in its natural state this is not the cut edge right so the cut edges are on the sides and this was one yard because of our washing shrunk up to about 34.5 inches the good thing is there wasn't a lot of distortion on this fabric when it got washed we can see over here at the side line up your selvedges and it's pretty close so we don't need to trim off too much and we're gonna try to get 17 inch cuts as much as possible if we need to go down to 16 and 1/2 that might be just depending on how much shrinkage your specific fabric had. Really we want to square, so if you have to make some small adjustments because of how much shrinkage you had or maybe you had a little bit of a generous cut that's okay we just need a square. so I'm using my smaller mat here because I feel like that's what most people probably have so we have our selvedge up here at the but I'm gonna fold it up one more time so that we can get a nice fresh cut I do not recommend stripe fabrics for beginners this stripe fabric is really cute and I am drawn to it but if you are gonna use a stripe fabric as a beginner just be really cautious because those lines are real good about calling out your mistakes and so having an all-over print or a solid is sometimes a little bit better because it hides things a little bit more than stripes can. you're gonna take your 6 x 24 inch ruler and we're gonna line that up we're gonna use one of these horizontal black lines to go all the way across because we want that nice solid 90-degree angle so we're going to line that up get that over as close to the edge as we can while still getting all of those edges I'm gonna take your rotary cutter, cut it. Make sure we got all those layers alright so we have that one cut side but I'm actually gonna do my nice cut on the other side because I want to maximize as much of this fabric as possible to get that the largest square I possibly can. So go ahead and cut this other side we'll have plenty with our wits it's our the 36 inches that we cut for our one yard cut that's gonna be the tricky part. then I'll take the entire thing kind of use my tape measure I've got 34 so I feel confident going ahead and cutting at 17. so we line up one side over here take our ruler line that up at the 17 inch line and then we're gonna verify ourselves by making sure that one of these horizontal lines is going nice and straight across of this fabric and then that the 17 inch line down here and the 17 inch line up there are both in line with our ruler so that we make sure it's a nice 90 degree angle cut and because I cut it exactly in half I'm gonna assume that my other side is just fine. so here's what I'm gonna do now I want to maximize the amount of leftover fabric that I have because I want to use it in a later project so what I'm gonna do is cut off my selvedge edges because we don't want to sew with those. so now that I have this edge cut I'm gonna bring this over here because this side is folded so if I measure from our cut side I'll have a larger piece because it's folded over here as a scrap piece to use in a later project that way it's not two individual strips it's one piece so that's just a way to try to maximize your your fabric to have larger pieces for later use so here's my 17 line look at the line going horizontal I'm gonna look at my lines on the mat and then I'm also gonna look at that stripe so then see I have a larger piece as leftover we can use that for one of our later projects so now I've got two 17 inch squares I'm gonna set those aside for now and go ahead and do the same thing with our other piece of fabric to get two more 17 inch squares. The next step is strangely one of the most important steps for these mitered corners and that is actually ironing so if you've noticed at all in my learn to sew series or just in sewing in general to get that nice look it's not all just sitting at the machine and getting a straight stitch it's all the prep work you know making sure fabric is cut properly making sure everything is pressed properly and that is really the secret to getting really nice finished sewn projects. we need to have our seam gauge I like I really like to have the seam gauge because you can very easily adjust the sizing that you want to do. you can draw a line you can make a basically like a seam gauge out of like a cardboard but I just find that this is the easiest thing to keep track of and it has plenty of options so the first thing that we're gonna do is fold over our fabric all the way around all four corners to one inch so what we'll do is we'll move our seam gauge to the one inch mark and then that blue mark helps us know that it's gonna be one inch all the way around now linen fabric can be kind of squirrely sometimes so cotton like just straight 100% cotton woven like quilting cotton fabric presses beautifully the linen might give you a little bit of trouble so if you are using like a linen blend and sometimes you really have to get that steam to get a nice crisp line that's totally normal so you're not doing it wrong. so we'll fold it over making sure that the tip of the seam gauge is in that fold nice and straight and then it's folded over to this blue mark. I kind of like to do a quick press just to kind of get it to lay down flat I've got my steam on now that I've got this one whole side done I am going to I just kind of gave it a quick press now I'm going to go back through and give it a nice solid press this is going to be if doing this properly is going to be very helpful with our next steps and taking your time on this you won't regret it because it will help make your life easier later on in the project so you really want to have nice creases nice crisp creases here with the ironing continue that same thing going all the way around. also I want to mention this is a really fancy iron you do not need a fancy iron to make this project. I did all four sides of my 1 inch pressing so now I want you to open it up and assuming that you have a water-soluble pen if you're using a frixion pen or something that erases with heat you can skip this step but this is just one of those things it's going to make our life a little bit easier down the road. so where the crease is in this corner and want you to just put a little mark so right where that crease is in the corner going toward the outside edge I just have like a tiny little mark there after that you want to grab your seam gauge and now we're going to go to 1/4 inch and now we're gonna do a 1/4 fold. so you'll do the same thing going all the way around with a 1/4 I want to also mention that these proportions can be adjusted this is going to be the finishing size of our hem our mitered hem but if you want a little bit chunkier hem that's okay you could instead of ironing over at one inch you can iron over at a 1/2 inch and then still keep your 1/4 inch fold over or you can increase that 1/2 inch if you feel like a quarter of an inch is giving you a hard time you would definitely can play around with some of these proportions in order to give you kind of different sizes this because it was folded over one inch and then we tucked it under a quarter of an inch this is a 3/4 of an inch hem so don't worry too much about all that but I just want to say that if you are like oh I love this idea but I want it even larger or you want to make a larger napkin so you won't want to have a larger hem you can totally do that. we've got our creases grab your ruler we're gonna just tuck it here in this corner and because we did a 1 inch fold initially we need to make 2 inch marks so whatever that initial fold-over is you want to double that so I've got my 2 inch mark and I'm gonna take my pen and make a mark at the 2 inch mark and then over here at the 2 inch mark 2 inches down mark 2 inches down mark and then grab your ruler again and we're gonna make a diagonal line and this is why I had you make that little mark on the corner I'm gonna just make sure we're on the right track so I'm gonna connect those dots and that line should go right above that creased corner. so if for some reason you're making your mark below that corner, something's wrong all right so that just is like a little indication that we did it right we connected our two dots so do that on all four sides. that step is done let's head to the sewing machine. we are here at the sewing machine and what I want you to do is take your corner and here's my marked line and my crease is this way so this is my wrong side of the fabric and my fabric is not an obvious right or wrong side but if yours is this should be the wrong side this is the right side so we are going to take our right sides together and we are going to line up the marks so match up those marks on either side of the fabric and you'll know you're right if your fabric goes into a point and the rest of your fabric extending down are lined up. then what we'll do is just kind of flick that 1/4 crease it's already creased so it should flip over pretty easily. like this so here's that crease that quarter of an inch crease you can see the like the little tail coming off of the corner and this is how we're gonna sew it so just hold this with your fingers bring that under your machine and my blue line is here. I'm just gonna use this to mark it so where that creased over there's no line but you can put just it's not very far you'll follow it down with a straight stitch back stitch here back stitch here and make a straight line right along that blue line alright let me show you one more time at a little different angle. fold it so that the right sides go together and we can see this blue line on this side and we can see the blue line kind of coming through on the other side here so we're gonna match those up and we'll know we did it right coming to a nice point here and also the rest of our fabric is lining up going this direction then we'll flick that 1/4 crease that we made down the fabric was already creased should do this no problem but you should be able to see your line many presser feet have the center of it kind of cut out and so we'll just line our blue line or our marked line in line with that so we know we're going straight down. back stitch at the beginning in the end do the exact same thing on all four of those corners. okay I'm done with all four of my corners they look like this they look kind of funny you're gonna take your fabric scissors and we're gonna trim those dog ears off it's gonna go about a 1/4 away from that seam and trim any threads we don't want those in the way. then what you'll do flatten out the seam with your thumb or your finger so what I like to do is I like to use my index finger and I have nails so this is a little easier for me but I like to flatten it out get my finger right in place and then flip it use my fingernail to kind of point that corner out and then now you can see that mitered corner coming together. that way the seam allowance is distributed evenly we don't have all that bulk on one side or the other so do that on all four corners. then we're gonna go give it one more little press I want to point out too I'm using pink thread so that you guys can see it I'm using a contrasting thread on purpose but I would ultimately recommend a thread that's gonna blend really well with your fabric choice okay I'm gonna give it one more little quick press you know because this linen is gets kind of squirrely so when I've done this before with crisp kind of cotton fabrics I haven't needed to do this step so it's just gonna depend on if you feel like you need it or not you. can also throw some pins in there if you want to make sure that it stays down once you iron it. I'm at the machine I've got my standard sewing foot on here but I want to show you this foot so if your machine came with of what that looks like this so what this is is that has this little edge guide and these are called sometimes a blind hem foot or an edge foot this basic juki machine came with this foot and so if you have one don't go out and buy one but if you have one I'm gonna start my napkin using just the standard foot and show you exactly how to do that but then I'm gonna switch to this foot and show you guys how this works because it is super awesome the thing with this foot is make sure that you have space in the foot to move your needle position around because that is what is going to be key for this there are a few of these feet out there where it has a fixed position and it wants your needle to only go in one spot so if that's how yours looks don't use it just use the standard foot but if you can move your needle position around then grab it and I'll show you how to use it. First let's use a standard foot so basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna stitch very close to this fold on that hem so we're gonna just tack it down very very close to our edge kind of like the edge of the placement that we did if you watched the last video now we can do that a couple of different ways so I am going to use the left side of my presser foot going down that left fold and I'm going to put my needle position all the way on the left side and then you'll follow that fold with the left side of your presser foot and sew all the way down just like we've been doing with our placemat if you follow it along with that video we'll just follow it all the way around we'll pivot at the corner let me show you how to do that right now with this foot. we're running the fold along the left side of the foot I also forgot to mention that I bumped my stitch lengths up to a 3, I like a little bit bigger stitch length you can even go a little bit larger than that if you want but anywhere in the 2.5 to 3.4 kind of range and there's all fine and this is why that ironing is so important because we're using that fold I'm gonna come up over the corner and just like we've done before keep your needle down lift your presser foot up and pivot until we see it's kind of close that's pretty close to where it needs to be now you can see with this method it's a little bit harder to get the stitch right up close to the edge and so you can get a little bit closer with how you do your presser foot or kind of what lines you follow but we want to keep our lines straight so let's do this one more side and then I'll switch to the other foot so if you just have the standard foot go ahead and doing that all the way around and back stitch it and then you're done you can add an additional top stitch if you'd like but then you're all set. Let me show you real quick how to use this foot. it doesn't make it any more complicated it just simplifies it and allows you to use the tools that you already got with your machine which is pretty cool. so we can see down here at the bottom is where that edge guide is and that is the edge guide we're gonna run along the fold so with this foot we're gonna need to put our fold up against that guide like this so it's actually kind of going the opposite direction and that fold is gonna sit right there against that guide and then we're just going to make sure that our needle is going in the little cubby that is meant for the needle there's different feet out there you can kind of move this around make larger smaller hems and stitches just make sure you're being really careful so know that your needle isn't gonna hit anything on your foot. the only bummer is that it's a little bit harder to do the corners with this foot but I think you guys will be fine. let me get you a little closer so we're gonna kind of have to help it come up over that fold. so I'm just on the other side of that seam, lift the presser foot rotate it and see if we're about right that looks pretty good so the nice thing is all we have to do is worry about the fold being up against that guide and it makes for a really beautiful straight stitch back stitch when you get back to the beginning let's go back to the work table and take a look at the stitch differences okay so take let's take a look at this corner now this one that's real close to this edge right here that was using that edge foot again beautiful way of stitching it it gets nice and close it's super secure you can go really fast that way but if your machine did not come with one that's okay because this way is alright too this side also looks great you can get a nice straight stitch it's also secure there's nothing underneath here that's coming through everything is tacked down and easy to wash so either way is totally fine from the front side it doesn't matter it just looks like a stitch going all the way around so that's why you would want to use a coordinating thread I use the contrasting thread which is totally cute too but a coordinating thread will blend right in. if you want to go back to the machine and add another little stitch it's purely decorative it's not necessary to make sure that it's washable or secured but it's just adds that little extra touch so if you would like to by all means but it is not required. Happy Sewing!

Channel: Melanie Ham

Views: 90,449

Rating: 4.9254947 out of 5

Keywords: how to sew napkins, learn to sew, beginner sewing projects, how to sew, mitered corners, easy sewing projects, sewing projects, melanie ham, sewing, beginner, easy, sew, free sewing patterns, fabric napkins, how to make napkins, diy napkins

Id: 46sauefI8cw

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020