Tie Dye Cloth Napkins (or Our Further Venture into Hippie Hood)

Last summer I was on one of my many Salvation Army treasure hunting trips and I came across a plethora of white cloth napkins that I'm assuming, due to the "Northwest" stamped in the corner, had come from the airline.   They were marked in groups of 3 for $1.99 but were yellow tags which were 50% off that day so I bought a bunch with the intention of using them in lieu of paper napkins someday.  I got home and put them on a shelf in the laundry room and there they sat for the next 9 months or so.

Doing all of these Pinterest projects lately has gotten me in full on crafting/project mode and when I was doing laundry earlier this week, I happened to notice the napkins sitting on the shelf and made it my goal to get something done with them.  I had thought about dying them to hide stains from use.

When I was pregnant with the 3 year old, the family tie dyed t-shirts in matching colors for the new baby and his big brothers to wear when he came home from the hospital.

Oh gosh, he was just the cutest little thing!

We had a bunch of dye left over from that project, as well as all of the rubber bands, so yesterday the boys and I covered the table with plastic and got our creative on.  The boys had a blast doing this!  They needed me to help with most of the rubber banding but they would choose what patterns they wanted to do and we had fun experimenting with some of our own ways of folding and banding the napkins.

The absolutely LOVED using the dye!  They must have commented at least 20 times about how much fun tie dying was, how we should do it more often, how cool it was...And I only had a minor panic attack over two young boys playing with dye in my kitchen. (only two small splatters on the floor, whew!)

We let our napkins sit wrapped in plastic overnight and today we got to reveal them and check out our handiwork!  I ran them through the wash, and unfortunately, some of the white turned a bit dark from all of the excess dye so they're not quite as vibrant as they were before the wash, but I still think they look pretty darn cool!

Some of our favorites ended up being the experimental ones like the corner design in the upper right and the diagonal stripes on the lower left.

The upper right with the top and bottom stripe was another experimental one.

We also did some freehand designs like the top center one.

So now we have 20+ cloth napkins to use to reduce our use of paper napkins and paper towels.  With the bright, happy colors I think they'll be a lot more fun to use too!