Thanksgiving Napkins!

Ready for the next Thanksgiving project after the jute trivets?  Painted napkins!  We decided on white, rusty orange and gold for our color theme, and of course, how could I do anything without throwing in some geometric shapes!  Want to know how I did them?

(Yikes, sorry for the bad pictures!)

I bought some plain white napkins (which I pre-washed and ironed), some paint (the gold metallic paint is really cool), pulled out my fabric medium (which you mix with the acrylic paint) and paint brushes... and then just stared at my blank napkins.  I knew I wanted to do triangles somehow...  Since I normally lean towards precision, I thought about making some triangle stamps or using painter's tape to tape out the triangles.  But then I thought I should be a total rebel!  "Let's free-hand these bitches!"  (Too much in character?)

I used painter's tape to hold the napkin in place on the table and to provide basic line guides.  Then I just painted some triangles using the mixtures of acrylic paint and fabric medium.  The mixture calls for two parts paint to one part fabric medium.  I guesstimated the ratio instead of finding something to measure it out.  I was being a rebel, remember?

I thought the first one turned out pretty well, and decided to follow the same basic idea for each of them, but making them slightly different!

Once my sixteen napkins were painted, I let them dry over night.  (As I tried not to paint too thickly, they really were dry after only a few minutes.)

The next morning I heat set the paint by turning the napkins face down and ironing the back side.  I put a piece of paper towel down between the napkin and the ironing board in case the paint bled.  I found that the orange only slightly tinted the paper towel in a few places.

After they were all heat set with the iron, I washed, dried and ironed them again!

I really love how they turned out!!  (The gold looks better in person, so I'll try to get some better pictures of it on Thanksgiving.)  By painting the triangles free-hand, I think it gave them a perfectly imperfect look!  I can't wait to see what they look like folded up on the table!  But I'm getting ahead of myself; I still have a couple of more projects to go!!