Cloth Napkins And Anxiety

So, anxiety, it is a weird thing.

I've always been a pretty anxious person, and even when I know that there is no reason to freak out I have a hard time stopping myself. 

For example, in a couple of weeks and for the first time since my husband and I moved into our new house my in-laws are coming to visit. I adore my in-laws. Really, truly, they are wonderful people and we have a good relationship. I know that they are not going to judge me for my housekeeping, my cooking, or my hospitality. But I'm also totally freaked about them coming because I am going to judge me for my housekeeping and hospitality. Not the cooking, I am a bomb cook if I do say so myself. 

But because I'm anxious my brain is hyper focusing on totally inconsequential details. The fact that I still haven't finished the quilt for the guest room because it's been too hot to work on it? Meh, I got plenty of time. The fact that my napkins are artfully mismatched and I only have six of them? Oh my god PANIC!!!

I am literally loosing sleep over cloth napkins because of my stupid brain. 

Solution? In this case, make some cloth napkins and move on. Sometime I choose not to give in to the compulsion because if I reward my brains behavior it will do it again in the future. And yes, I kind of think of my brain as a naughty puppy that I have to train. But sometimes you just have to pick your battles. I had 2 yards of fabric from my grandmother's stash that I had been meaning to make into napkins for a while now. 

So yesterday I cut out 8 18" squares from an adorable red checked lightweight cotton and brought them to Mom's house. Napkins can be 16, 18, 20, or even 22 inch squares. I picked 18 because that is how long the ruler I could find was. If you are doing them on a sewing machine with metered corners you need to cut them larger then you want them to end up, but I wanted to do them as easily as possible. Thus, going to Mom's house. 

See, my mom has a serger. Technically I have one too but I can't actually get it to work. The neat thing about sergers is that they can do a rolled hem stitch. Mom and I learned that to set it up, you should really read the instructions because it wasn't actually as easy as just take out one of the needles and get going. There was some other 1" metal bit whose function I am totally not clear on, but which made the rolled hem totally not work. But once we got it set up right it really was super duper easy. Just line of the fabric and zoom down the edge. No folding, no pressing, no metered corners and no wasted fabric. Love it! I didn't go over there with the intention of having my mom do them for me, but it did work out that way because my mom is super rad and she loves me.

Look how pretty she made my napkins!

Note: At the time that I wrote this the guest room quilt totally wasn't done, but I forgot to actually hit publish on this post when I wrote it a week ago. Now the quilt is done and I will be blogging about it, possibly later today.