Faux Leather Napkin Rings From an Old Belt

I don't know about you, but I hate waste and when my husband changed his belt recently, I wondered what could I do with his old belt, it wasn't completely useless (as a belt yes), but there was still plenty of strap to turn into something else and I had just the project in mind...

A set of napkin rings.

So let's get to it.

TOOLS:

• Cutting board
• Hammer
• Rotary cutter
• Rotary hole punch
• Hole punch tube 1.5 mm
• Ruler
• Scissors
• Needle
• Pencil

MATERIALS:

• Old belt
• Eyelets (12 black and 48 red)
• 6 Old buttons (whatever size and colour your like)
• 6 Black four hole buttons for attaching
• Black cord

The first step was to trim up the old belt. Luckily I only needed to cut off the end with the holes and the buckle part, leaving me with enough flat belt to cut into 6 x 13cm length pieces, the PERFECT size to go around my napkins.

Now we need to start decorating.

We are going to be putting a LOT of holes in these pieces, but don't worry it'll look amazing, I promise.

I wanted to sew up the ends with black cord, so I needed some holes on both ends, about 0.5 cm away from the edge. I decided to put 3 holes in total with a spacing of 0.75 cm apart. For the small holes I used a 1.5 mm hole punching tube and a hammer. You will feel like you are hammering FOREVER, but don't lose hope, it's worth it in the end.

Next came the centre holes. I wanted to attach a large toggle button (from an old coat) in the middle as a decorative feature, but I needed some way to attach the toggle button and I figured some eyelets and black cord would work perfectly. For this I used the rotary hole punch.

For the larger holes I hammered in a black eyelet, which makes the hole nice and neat.

4 more holes on ether side of the centre were punched into the strap using the rotary punch. This time I switched for red eyelets to fill these holes. They make a nice contrast don't you think?

With all the holes and eyelets in place, now we can start attaching the toggles and turning these straps into napkin rings!

Using 20 cm of black cord, folded in two and passed through the toggle button, one on the left side and another on the right side. Pull the ends through the loop and tighten with a cow hitch knot.

Pass each of the four strand ends through the black centre eyelets (2 on the left and 2 on the right) and attach with a black button, finishing with a double knot, firmly attaching the toggle button to the strap.

Taking more black cord (around 50 cm) I double stitched the strap ends together, overlapping the 3 holes on each side to form a nice tight bind, afterwards I cross stitched through the red eyelets, finishing with triple knots (on the inside of the ring) to hold it in place.

Who would ever think you could upcycle an old belt (destined for the bin), plus some buttons and turn them into functional AND stylish table decor.

All that's left for me to do is host a dinner party to show off my "new" napkin rings.