DIY Holiday Tea Towels
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.
These tea towels are made using fabric printed by Spoonflower. Each towel requires just one fat quarter and I recommend either Cotton Twill or Linen Cotton Canvas. I created a small collection of designs including the ones shown above. The designs are shown rotated sideways incase you’d like to Fill-A-Yard® and print multiple designs on one yard — see below for instructions on how to use the Fill-A-Yard® feature on Spoonflower. Here are links to the designs shown above:
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