Initial Coasters (Almost a fail)

After thinking about it for a few days I decided the trivets & bowl didn't feel like enough to give my future sister-in-law for her shower. I wanted to do something a little more personal, something that would mean something to the both of them becoming a family.

Thankfully, I found the perfect napkins to make a set of coasters similar to the ones I made around the holidays.

Materials:

• Cocktail Napkins 
• Tile (mine are from the same box I got before the holidays at the ReStore.)
• Mod Podge (which I STILL cannot believe isn't called Modge Podge.)
• Foam brush
• Sealer/varnish
• Cork sticker thingies to protect the table from the tile (not picture anywhere... sorry!!!)

Step one, wash the tile:

Open the napkin and decide what portion you are going to use:

Then trim it to the part you are going to use and remove the back layer if your napkin is more than one ply, which it likely is.

It turns out, mine were actually 3 ply - I didn't realize this for the 1st 3 coasters, but don't worry, I actually ruined my entire first set of these and when I remade them, I made sure to remove the 2 back layers rather than just 1... more on my mistakes later.

Apply a gob of mod podge to the tile and spread it out:

Then apply your napkin to the top of the tile and coat with mod podge.

Now in the above picture, you can start to see where this project was going wrong... see how the edge of the napkin is visible all the way around? That happened for 2 reasons, first, the area I wanted to show was smaller than my napkin and second, because I didn't remove the 2nd of the 3 ply napkin.

To deal with that I made my third mistake (I was on a roll, why stop at 2 mistakes...) I applied the boarder of the napkins to the tile.

But because of the irregular edge of my tile, the perfect line of the stripes, and how hard it can be to perfectly place this light weight napkin on the tile... we ended up with this:

Ughhhh... that is not the look I was going for.

Thankfully, I started them early enough to start over... and in doing so, I removed that 2nd ply - which meant that once the mod podge was applied over the napkin, then the sealer... the edge of the napkin completely disappeared. All I had to do was apply the cork think to the back to protect surfaces from the course tile and they were good to go!

There... THAT is the look I was going for. Very simple, elegant...

I like them so much, I just might make a set for us.