Last Thanksgiving, I tie-dyed a white cotton table runner using the Japanese Shibori technique. It typically involves folding, twisting or bunching cloth and binding it, then dyeing it in indigo. Whatever is used to bind the fabric will resist the dye, resulting in areas of the cloth that take the distinctive blue dye in patterns created by the resistance, and other areas of the cloth that remain white. Got that?

Anyway, it’s a very easy process, and admittedly a little addictive. I found myself wanting to grab anything white that was laying around and dunking it into the dye bucket.

I enjoyed the end result enough to think of more household things I could dye. Given that we use dozens of cloth napkins each week for mealtimes, we could always use more. So napkins it was.

Here’s a short video tutorial I made of the process: