Getting Your Irish On, Canada-Style

My Canadian family has some Irish background. Although my father's family has long believed themselves to be Scottish and English, a few years ago I discovered through some research on Ancestry.ca that they had some Irish background as well, and when my father had his DNA tested in late fall 2017, it was confirmed that he is indeed ethnically part Irish. As for my mother, her maternal grandparents were both Irish-born, and they brought her up, so she has always had a certain bias towards Ireland and the Irish. Her first trip overseas was to Ireland, and it is not wise to make slighting remarks about the Irish to her, though my father routinely does because he enjoys getting her riled up. (When his DNA analysis proved that he too has Irish roots, I said to him that he'd have to stop slagging the Irish to Mum now. He said, "Oh no, I'm still going to do it.")

My sister has a an Irish first name and is quite Irish-looking, and she embraces all things Irish in the slightly cutesy, fetishistic way North Americans do. A year or so ago when I was browsing her Pinterest board "Getting Your Irish On", I came across this photo of a stencilled tablecloth, which originally appeared in a slideshow of Irish-inspired decorating ideas on the Better Homes and Gardens website. I liked the tablecloth too, and saved it to my own Pinterest board on crafting ideas and techniques. And then, when I was coming up with gift ideas for Christmas 2017, I got inspired to make something similar for my sister. I soon decided that it would be better to make stencilled placemats instead of a tablecloth, as my sister would be much more likely to use the placemats. Then I expanded the idea into a "Irish dinner party set" concept by deciding I would also make matching table napkins and buy a Irish cookbook to go with it. Maybe I'd even get her a piece of Belleek china to go with it. She'd be able to host a St. Patrick's Day dinner party in style!

The Belleek idea I soon gave up as it would make the total cost of the gift too expensive for my budget. The cookbook was easy to buy. Finding suitable fabrics for the placemats and napkins proved to be much more challenging than I expected. I looked for fabrics for this project every time I visited a fabric store in 2017 (which was, um, often). I also looked for plain, ready made placemats and napkins that could be stencilled, but was never able to find anything that was both suitable and affordable. It wasn't until November 2017, when I had almost given up hope of being able to carry out my Irish dinner party set gift plan, that I finally found the part linen, part unknown fibres pale sage fabric you see above in Fabricland. Fabricland didn't have anything suitable for the table napkins, but I took a chance that I'd find something and bought enough of the linen to make the placemats. My leap of faith proved justified as I found a slightly paler sage polyester at another fabric place that same day.

Stencils are expensive, so I bought blank plastic stencil sheets, then found a couple of suitable Celtic graphics on Pinterest and printed them off in order to make my own. I cut the paper stencil, traced it onto the plastic with a felt tip pen, and then cut the plastic stencil out with an exacto knife. I bought a dollar store bottle of acrylic craft paint in Hunter Green. (My original plan called for a cream stencil on green fabrics, or a green stencil on cream fabric, but the sage fabrics I bought were so pale a green that a cream wouldn't have shown to good effect.) And then I was in business.

Here's a photo of a few of the placemats and napkins from the completed set, with the cookbook. I made eight of the placemats and eight of the napkins, as I know my sister buys her tableware in sets of eight. The project proved to be a "just in time" production as I worked on the sewing in December and then did the stencilling on Christmas Eve. I used a set of my own placemats and napkins as patterns for this set, making paper patterns out of a brown paper bag and taking my cue for the mitred corners you see on these sage table napkins from my own commercially made table napkins.

When I shut myself in my room at my parents' place at 7:40 p.m. on Christmas Eve to begin Operation Stencil, my original plan was to stencil the napkins as well as the placemats, but when I experimented on a scrap of the polyester, I found I didn't like the way it looked and also realized that the paint would give the napkins a stiff texture that would feel quite unpleasant against one's face. I set the napkins aside and focused on the placemats, and again worked on a piece of scrap material to get an idea of how the stencil would look and how to configure it. I stencilled the placemats on one side only, which gives my sister the option of flipping them over and using them as a plain, neutral set of table linens. I was done all the stencils by 9:40, including clean up, and left the placemats to dry on my bed while I went upstairs to enjoy the remainder of my Christmas Eve.

When we opened our presents on Christmas morning, my sister seemed to like her Irish-esque dinner party set. She paged through the cookbook commenting on the recipes therein with her best Irish accent, which is actually pretty creditable. (The Irish accent is an easy one for a Canadian to do, as the pronunciation is quite similar and we just have to add a bit of a lilt to be well on our way.) My sister took the pictures in this post herself, as I had forgotten to bring my camera to my parents' place to photograph the completed set. The photo of the whole set above was taken in her dining room, where it seems to work well with the decor.

Although... my mother tells me that when she and my father had supper at my sister's place on Robbie Burns Day, Alanna honoured this Scottish holiday by serving them an Irish stew made from the cookbook on her Celtic placemats, which made me feel as though I might have picked the wrong British Isle after all.