Reemergence (Napkins)

Catching up some more on things I've missed posting about, this is a birthday gift I made for my friend this past summer.

I had bought some linen napkins quite a while ago with the intention of doing something with them for my friend, but I hadn't quite figured out what. This year I decided that I would make her some Harry Potter themed napkins. The next trick was to figure out what to do for a design.

I decided that since I had four napkins, I would do the four houses. It was tricky to find a design that was simple enough to embroider in the time frame I had (I mean I would never leave a project until the last minute 😄).

I found a design I liked, that I traced from my computer. I looked tonight to try to find them again so I could credit where they came from, but I wasn't able to. I found them in use other places, but not the original that I used. I also changed the design a bit. I didn't love the design for of the lion, so I ended up changing that out for a different one.

Next up was to pick out the house colours. I have some embroidery floss, but not a whole lot. I ended up needing to borrow embroidery floss from my friend in order to make her gift 😂.

I did a simple running stitch around the design and then back the other way. I believe I used two strands of thread for the stitching. Here you can see some of my work and some of the designs.

 

Originally I was planning on doing the four napkins as one for each house, but then as I got thinking I decided that if I did it that way then people using the napkins would have to pick a house and might not get the one they wanted. Instead, I chose to do the houses one in each corner of each napkin, so each person could decide which one they wanted independent of everyone else.

I also wasn't sure which way I wanted to stitch the two colours into each house design, so I decided to do two of the napkins one way, and then invert the colours for the other two napkins. You might be able to see that if you zoom in really closely on the picture with all four napkins in it.

One of the tricky things about working on the napkins was that you can see the back of the project, so I had to be careful as I worked that I didn't make things too messy.

So now you know a little more of what I was working on last summer :).