©
Janet Davis
With four grown children and loads of
friends and family sharing the table at our lakeside cottage, people often
forgot where they sat and which napkin was theirs. Loving the feel of cloth napkins but not wanting to wash linen
all the time, I struck on the “individual napkin ring” idea, 
but with a cottage/nature theme.
I stained a dozen unfinished wooden napkin rings (obtainable at some craft stores) a soft fern-green. Then, using podge craft glue, I découpaged a small rectangle of fern-motif wrapping paper on each ring, applying the glue under and over the paper. On top of that I glued a “cottage nature word” cut from assorted magazines. Once the glue dried, I applied several coats of water-based varathane to protect the finished rings.
Now, guests get to choose what they’d like to “be” for the weekend.: water, stone, sunshine, trees, white pine, cottage, summer, moss, grass, green, fern or shore. And it works pretty well -- all except for the men. Guys tend to confuse fern and moss, summer and sunshine, so I’m thinking of doing a new series for them, with words they’ll remember. Like bass, snooze, hammock, campfire, belly-flop and beer.
Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Cottage Life magazine