Tea Towel Weekend

This weekend it was all about tea towels at our house. They're pretty much my favorite thing ever! They're useful, beautiful and dry quickly, even in high humidity. They make awesome souvenirs from trips (omg, go to London if you want to come home with a million tea towels!) or gifts for pretty much anyone. They can be printed, woven, embroidered or patched. Traditionally they're made from linen (I hate sewing linen) but cotton towels are just as nice (I LOVE sewing cotton!).

I made these tea towels from fabric I ordered from Spoonflower.



The print is from Heather Ross's amazing book: Heather Ross Prints. The book comes with a CD loaded with image files of lots of her prints. There are a lot of cute projects in the book but you can, of course, print the files onto whatever kind of fabric you want and make whatever you want.



You can get 4 tea towels out of one (54" wide) yard of fabric. For these towels, I like the linen-cotton canvas from Spoonflower...it feels mostly like cotton, not all springy and gross like linen (I seriously hate linen so much).

I also printed a set of her monogrammed Snow White towels.



Adorable!!



And lastly, I made these Liberty of London tea towels using my Freezer Paper trick. It makes perfectly perfect fabric strips every time.



Do you love Liberty? I do! Looking at these towels makes me so, so happy!



The fabric is a crisp, thick, bright white cotton with thicker stripes woven here and there. I love the juxtaposition of the calm, orderly stripes against the busy and colorful Liberty.



See? Tea towels are the best thing ever! Wouldn't you love to get these as a gift? Wouldn't you love to GIVE them as gifts? I know I would, and probably will. I can't keep ALL the tea towels for myself...right? I mean, that would be terribly selfish...wouldn't it? ...maybe I'll just make more...