Homemade Christmas Napkin Rings with Plastic Canvas

Learn how to make festive Christmas napkin rings that will dress up your holiday table!

These DIY Christmas Napkin Rings are easy and inexpensive if you’re on a budget. With this tutorial, the homemade napkin rings are cheap napkin rings since you’ll only need leftover craft supplies: scrap plastic canvas, scrap yarn and small beads.

There are so many different ways to make affordable Christmas napkin rings yourself - with felt, toilet paper rolls, ribbon, beads and more.

Our DIY Christmas Pine Needle and Berry napkin ring is an easy inexpensive project to make, stitches together quickly, can be completed with minimal effort, used year after year and is so much cheaper than store-bought napkin rings.  If you have the supplies, it will cost absolutely NOTHING!

Are you ready to jump into the DIY Christmas Pine Needle and Berry Napkin Ring tutorial?  Then, watch our video Or keep reading this post.

You can also sew your very own DIY cloth napkins with this simple sewing project for beginners. 

INSTRUCTIONS for making the Christmas napkin rings:

STEP 1: gather supplies

One thing nice about this Christmas napkin ring project is the supplies for this project are affordable.  And most crafters have a load of supplies already on hand.

Do you have scrap plastic canvas?  Do you have a small amount of green, white and gold yarn?  What about small beads?  That's all you need to make some pine needle & berry napkin rings to dress up your holiday table along with needles, scissors and thread.

STEP 3: stitch pine needles

Thread a length of green yarn through the plastic canvas needle eye.  If you have difficulty, try this needle threading hack. 

Follow the chart to stitch the green pine needles using a long straight stitch and long slanted diagonal stitches. When beginning to stitch on plastic canvas, cover the yarn tail with stitches.

STEP 4: Tent Stitch background of napkin rings

Then work the background with the tent stitch (continental stitch) leaving two threads on each end unworked.  These two threads will be used in joining the ring.

After the background is stitched, it should look like the following picture. Notice the two unstitched threads.

STEP 5: add beads to the Christmas napkin ring

Adding beads is a stunning way to embellish the napkin ring.

With a sewing needle and sewing thread, attached the beads to the rectangle napkin ring piece.

Choose a needle that will fit through the hole in the bead.  I recommend you double thread the sewing needle.   Double threading in sewing is when you put the thread through the needle eye, fold the thread in half so the two ends meet and tie a knot.

Anchor the sewing thread (with the knot) on the back of the rectangle piece where you want to place the first bead.  Make a small stitch to secure the thread and knot.

Bring the threaded needle up from the back through one of the plastic canvas holes, pass the needle through the bead and insert the needle down through the canvas hole next to the previous hole.

Sew on all the beads according to the chart.

Don't have beads?  An alternative to beads is to make French knots with red yarn.

STEP 6: Joining the napkin ring

To make sure the napkin ring is sturdy and forms a perfect ring, a small reinforcement piece is used to join the rectangle piece into a ring.

Line up one row of holes on the reinforcement piece behind the unworked row on one of the short ends of the napkin ring rectangle.

Bring the yarn up through the hole where you'll begin the tent stitch.  Refer to the following picture for the placement of this stitch.

Work the needlepoint tent stitch through both thicknesses of plastic canvas all the way across the row.

Then bend the plastic canvas into the ring and line up the other unworked row of holes on the short end of the ring with the unworked row on the reinforcement piece. Stitch through all thicknesses to hold the ring together.

What's left is one row of plastic canvas threads unstitched. Finally, stitch over the last row of threads.

STEP 7: overcast stitch

The final step is to use the overcast stitch to cover both edges of the napkin ring.

For this project, gold yarn was used for the overcast stitch but green or red would also look attractive. Once you are finished end the yarn by weaving it under the stitches..

Voila! It's finished!

Within 30 minutes to an hour, you will have a beautiful holiday napkin ring to brighten your dining table.

I really had fun with this DIY Napkin Ring project and I hope you do as well.

Want more ideas for Christmas? There is a super collection of Christmas crafts ideas for adults on our website!

(We didn't forget kids.  We have them too!  Here are  Christmas and Winter crafts for kids. )

I hope to see you here again soon and in the meantime, we would love for you to sign up for our newsletter, that way you will be notified each time we release a new tutorial! You'll get access to all of our new FREE patterns, FREE project tutorials and lots more!

Happy Crafting!
Annette