Hand Paint Linen Napkins to Look Like Embroidery

How to create embroidery-like designs the easy way

Is there anything as elegant as linen dinner napkins? And they’re so easy to make! I whipped up a set of four this morning by cutting 4 20-inch squares out of a piece of white linen, ironing them, and then making a double ¼ inch hem. Voila. Simple and easy. But once I had them finished, I thought they needed a little embellishment to take them to the next level. Unfortunately, my plan of learning to embroider this winter never really worked out (there’s always next winter), so I thought about different ways I could decorate the napkins in an embroidery-like way. The winner: Hand painted linen napkins using fabric markers.

I’ve never painted on fabric before, but the idea came to me that I could draw some botanical illustrations on the linen using fabric markers. I did a google search, and though I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, I did determine that the fabric markers could create some really vivid and bright designs. To Amazon I went, and 2 days later, I had the markers in hand.

OK, let’s get started.

Materials for hand painted linen napkins

A set of light colored linen napkins – that you made yourself or purchased. There are a ton available on Etsy at very reasonable prices. I used the ones I made by hand, using white linen from fabrics-store.com – my favorite source of linen fabric.

An embroidery or quilting hoop comes in handy for this project to keep the fabric taut as you draw. I tried it with and without and it was much easier with. If you don’t have this and don’t wish to purchase it, you can just hold it as tight as you can with your spare hand.

Fabric markers – I bought the Tulip Dual Tip Fabric Markers. I liked that they had a fine tip and a brush tip so I could do detail work plus color the designs in. The colors in the pack are ok. Though if this is a craft I plan to continue, I’d buy one with a more natural looking palette. The set I bought included highlighter yellow, highlighter orange, and highlighter blue – not the best colors for botanicals. If you want to outline the design in black like I’ve done, be sure to get a pack with black in it.

Inspiration. To get ideas for what flowers to paint, I looked at an embroidery book I have, a wildflower identification book, and Peggy Dean’s Botanical Line Drawing. I am not a skilled artist, so I ended up using the Peggy Dean book for all my designs. She includes step by step instructions to draw a ton of different flowers, and it’s kind of foolproof, even if you can’t draw!

Step-by-step instructions

• Iron your napkins.
• Decide where you want your artwork to go on the napkin. I wanted it on the bottom right corner. With pencil, I lightly marked the area that I wanted the artwork to go and I did this on all 4 napkins so they were all the same.

• Put your first napkin into your quilting hoop if you have one. Draw it as tight as you can.

• Choose your first design and practice it a few times with pencil on a piece of sketching paper. This is also a good time to decide on your color scheme and try it out. I chose four different designs: Cosmos, Daisies, a Desert Rose, and a Daffodil.
• With a scrap piece of similar fabric, try out the markers to see how they feel and to get a feel for what the various colors look like. I stayed with lighter colors because I wanted the black outline to show through. The markers can stick a bit on the fabric, so I used a light touch and just went over the lines several times until I got the result I wanted.

• Outline your design using the fine point side of the black marker.

• Fill the outlines in with the colors of your choice using the brush marker side or the fine tip side.

• Erase the pencil marks using a white eraser.
• Take it out of the hoop and admire your beautiful work!
• Repeat with the rest of the napkins. You can do the same design for all of them, or try different designs on each one, like I did.

• Let the ink dry for 24 hours, then you can wash your napkins in the washing machine with cold water and iron them.

I’m really happy with how these turned out. To me, they have the look of embroidery, but the whole process took about 30 minutes – really! You could, of course, do this on any type of fabric, including placemats, or clothing, or even white canvas shoes! You can also do any design at all – not just botanicals. Also, You could make monograms using stencils, or any pattern at all. The possibilities are endless.

What would you like to try? Drop a comment below and let us know! We love to hear what our readers are working on.