DIY Holiday Tea Towels

For the DIY sewist: A quick ready-to-finish beautiful handmade gift by you … for yourself or a special friend this holiday season!

In case you don’t sew, we have many finished kitchen towels in fun designs that are ready to gift!

Time estimate: 30 to 60 minutes to make one dishtowel from a fat quarter in 100% cotton twill.

Available fat quarters:

DIY holiday tea towel

I opted to pre-wash the fabric and found that I had to stretch it a tiny bit to reshape before trimming the selvages off. Not hard to do, but next time I think I’ll trim + finish first and then wash to see if that makes any difference.

Trim selvages from fabric

After trimming the selvages, I followed this video from Purl Soho to miter the corners. Instead of the 1/2” seam in the video, I folded the edges 1/4” at a time to keep the towel as big as possible. Before edge-stitching the border down, I tucked a small strip of ribbon into the seam to make the towel easy to hang. That’s it!

Miter the corners

Before edge-stitching the border seam, tuck a small length of ribbon or twill tape into the corner.

If you want to make 4 towels using different designs …

  • Head to Spoonflower and click “Start Designing” to use the Fill-A-Yard® feature

  • Choose the ‘Horizontal Split’ template

  • Pick your fabric and click ‘design your project’

  • The example here shows what the layout will look like when Chalet and 12 Days are selected to fill the yard (click to enlarge)

Thanks for reading along! I hope you enjoy making some of these as much as I did. Stay well and keep creating!

XO,
Kate