T-shirt Napkins

So, September just flew by, didn't it?

Back to school, work trips, school placement drama for both boys---yada yada yada.

On a completely unrelated topic, I've been thinking how much I hate our cloth napkins these days.  They are really raggedy looking, and the new denim material I used to make the last batch of cloth napkins didn't work so good.  They are wrinkled like crazy out of the wash, and danged if I am going to iron *napkins*.  The older napkins are nice and soft, but they look like something you'd pull out of a rag bag to polish your shoes.  Also, I used too narrow hems on them, and they flip up annoyingly.  This could be fixed if I ironed them, but, as I said...

So, I took a pile of old T-shirts which had been threatening to eat my bed--it was bigger than this petite stack:

And turned them into this much more useful stack:

Nice wide 1" hems, and thank goodness my machine has decorative stitches on it.  I use the feather stitch almost exclusively, despite all the choices.  I find a 12-14 finished size (so cut 14-16" square) makes a nice handful.  I ditched the white and black T-shirts immediately for recycling or donation to the pet shelter (I think they use it for bedding?).  I may fish the black ones back out, having realized the scraps can be cut into 1" strips for the crocheted rug weaving I keep planning to do.  Old white T-shirts are only useful for cleaning rags, and I have plenty of these, thanks!  So, I inventoried my ginormous pile of T's, and realized I have 3 bankers boxes full!  I guess we won't be running out of napkins anytime soon!

I have tried making other things--like shopping bags out of them.  The bags came out cute, and were easy, but turned out to be too stretchy/flimsy for groceries.  My solution the to the local plastic bag ban did not pan out.  The T-shirt bags are perfect for carrying yarn around, of which I do have a lot....but that's another problem for another day!