To Have And To Hold....Napkins!

Another project that I found on Do-It-Yourself-Weddings, fabric and toilet paper roll napkin rings! These were super easy to do, and will add a nice pop of color to the purple napkins I plan on using on ivory table linens, like how I mocked them up in this post.

To start, I cut the green fabric (same fabric that I used for two of the card box layers) into 10 sections that were 7 inches by 33 inches:


We then cut each section into 10 2.75 inches by 6.4 inches (with the laser cutter, of course! I'm much too lazy for hand cutting!).


(yeah, see that dust on the top of the laser cutter? That's left over from sanding the wood from our biggest project to date, our 6 foot tall cupcake stand, which I'll be sharing soon.)

It only took about 10 minutes to cut out 100 pieces of fabric, plus about 5 extras for mess ups.


The laser cutter does a nice job of slightly melting the edges of the fabric, which was very useful for this project. If you're using a thicker fabric like I was, you wouldn't want to fold it under to hide the edges, or it would be too thick, so you should consider using a lighter to seal the edge from fraying.


Back at home, I made a cutting guide at 1 1/8th inch increments, to cut each toilet paper roll into 4 sections. This was a product of saving the paper rolls for several months to have enough!


My bag of 105 cut rolls. They crease a tiny bit when cutting them, but it doesn't matter because once the fabric is on it helps it hold its round shape.


After cutting all the rolls, I started assembling them. I covered the paper roll with hot glue:


And wrapped the fabric around the outside. I then added an extra strip of glue right under the overlapping edge of the fabric, sealing it as close as possible to the roll.


Then stand the roll up on its side


And glue one side into the roll, folding it as flat as you can around the roll (it doesn't matter so much on this side if the edge of the fabric is flush to the roll).


Then turn it over and glue the other side into the roll.


I then carefully glued down the edges inside the roll as best I could.


Not bad for toilet paper rolls, fabric and glue! I decided to not worry too much about how the inside of these looked, they're good enough so they won't fray, and nobody is going to be looking at the inside of them (am I kidding myself thinking anybody is even going to look at the outside of them? Hmm....maybe, but I like them anyway!).


I got about 1/5th of them done in an afternoon, and will finish the rest over the next week or so. They are more time consuming than the tutorial I found online said, but maybe that was also because I was really making sure to glue the edges down well, to hide the white batting on the underside of my fabric.


And here is a look at what they'll look like on napkins, using a scrap of purple fabric. The purple linen napkins will really be a little darker/brighter purple.


Did you come across any easy DIY projects that used unconventional supplies?