How to Make Do-It-Yourself Hand-Dyed Wedding Napkins
Guest Blog Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 1:18PM 
If you're thinking of great wedding inspiration for the coming spring/summer season, look no further than 100 Layer Cake - one of our favorite wedding blogs. They cover a variety of weddings and feature top wedding vendors, from the best photographers to the best florists. We thought you'd like to see this fun wedding craft. It's by Rachel, and you really need to pop over to Rachel’s blog. Here's how she describes her nifty DIY idea.
This project is so beautiful and REALLY relevant to any one of us with a crafty heart. You could make these to use around the house, for a special holiday dinner party, for a bridal shower, a festive brunch, for gifts ... the list goes on. All the pretty photos and projects make good inspiration for life, not just weddings.
We decided to rent the plainest, cheapest white tablecloths possible for our long dining tables. And since we weren’t having lots of fresh flowers or pretty place settings, we knew we’d want to use the napkins to add some color. The side benefit was that we got to have cotton napkins, which I love – they're actually absorbent, unlike the standard polyester ones you can rent from most places.
Napkins are easy enough to sew, but all that hemming is time consuming so I decided to start with pre-made napkins. If you’re having a smaller wedding, you could definitely save some money by making your own. Just start super early.
We wanted a striped look, but as we started playing with the process we found that we really loved the striped tie-dye effect we came up with. Have several extra napkins on hand so that you can experiment. Folding the napkins in different positions will give you stripes in different places and you’ll want to test your dye intensity and rinsing and drying procedures – all of these factors impact your final product.
Supplies
Napkins (plain, sturdy cotton ones from here) – $250 for 180 napkins
Fabric dye (we used Rit powder) – $15 for several boxes with coupons
Salt – $2
Tubs for dying – used some storage containers we had
Gloves – had them
1. Prewash and dry all your napkins
2. Mix up your dye according to the instructions on your package, but with less water. We used Rit dye and we added the dye powder + 1/2 cup salt to 2 cups of hot water and then mixed that with an additional 4 cups of water. Depending on your desired intensity, you can vary this amount.
3. Fold the napkins. This is where you want to experiment. The placement of your stripes will vary based on how you fold the napkins.
4. Dip the folded edges of your napkins in the dye, holding for anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes, depending on how saturated you want them. The dye will gradually creep up a little.
5. Rinse your napkins in warm water, gradually decreasing the temperature to cool, until the water runs almost completely clear. If you want well-defined stripes, rinse very well at this point. If you want stripes + solid color background, rinse them gently but don’t worry about getting to the clear water point.
6. Hang dry if you want better-defined stripes. If you prefer your napkins to have softer stripes + solid color background, you can skip this step and put them directly in the washer.
7. Run the napkins through the washing machine on warm (if you’re doing multiple colors, only run a single color in each cycle!). The colors will bleed a bit, which I liked because it gave them a nice overall color with the contrasting stripes.
8. Tumble dry and fold. The color will be totally set at this point – no worries about it smearing on your guests if the napkins get wet.
Large Batch Operation
We folded napkins individually, then stacked them together, used a large binder clip to keep them in place, and then filled an entire rectangular storage container (which had the dye in it) with rows and just left them to soak up the dye. We could do about 30 napkins at a time this way.
Total Costs
We spent about $270 on this project. The cotton napkins are $1.53 each to purchase vs. 70 cents to rent. So yes, this definitely increased our expenditure, especially because we ordered enough napkins to accommodate our entire guest list, since we knew we wouldn’t have the final guest count in until much later. But I really loved the napkins, they were useful, and they did add a lot to our tables. We tucked the programs and menus right inside and they functioned as our seating labels as well.
If you haven’t seen Rachel + Dustin’s beautiful wedding, be sure to give it a looksie ASAP.
Process photos by Rachel.
Wedding photos by Fresh in Love Photography.
Thanks to 100 Layer Cake for their beautiful photographs, posts, and wedding inspiration. 100 Layer Cake is a unique, comprehensive wedding planning resource for and by thoughtful, crafty modern women. Their vendors, projects, weddings, resources, sponsors, and marketplace are hand-picked and thoroughly researched with the hope that every single one is a truly unique addition to both your wedding and your planning process. Visit the 100 Layer Cake website today.
If you're interested in learning more about wedding planning and decor, we encourage you to explore the Sheffield School, New York, NY. Sheffield began as an Interior Design school in 1985, and then expanded our course offerings to train people in other design-related fields, including Feng Shui, Wedding and Event Planning, and Jewelry Design. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any school in the world.
100 Layer Cake, DIY, crafts, napkins in Weddings
Reader Comments (18)
These tips are very good, thanks for sharing this.
Greetings