kojotutorial: hand towels with birds and monograms

Four reasons to love giving customized hand towels this Christmas:
1- You can give them as a stand-alone gift.
2- You can use them to wrap an edible gift (green gift wrap at its best!).
3- You can find hand towels in all sorts of price ranges. The ones I used were from the dollar store (and super cute if I do say so myself). You could also find high end hand towels at a department store, Anthropologie or Crate & Barrel if that’s what you need, though.
4- The appliques are yet another way to use up your fabric scraps. And appliques are super easy… a little addicting (which is dangerous for a girl like me who, during the making of these towels, stopped to also applique a onesie and was looking for more items in need of cute appliques as well), but super easy.

To craft yourself some personalized hand towel-y goodness, you’ll need:
-store bought hand towel
-fabric scraps
-fusible webbing
-iron
-sewing machine (optional)

1. Print out the images you’d like to applique onto the hand towels (in my case, a capital “I” for the Ingrams and a bird silhouette).

2. Trace the images backwards onto one side of your fusible webbing (my tracing is in red… I changed my mind from “L” to birds).

3. Tap the iron in a couple of places to adhere little smidges of the fusible webbing to your scrap fabric (this helps the fusible webbing and the fabric stay put so your images match exactly). Then cut around your soon-to-be appliques.

4. Peel the backing off of the webbing and iron your applique to the hand towel.

6. Wrap up your finished gift and cross someone off your list. Or set aside for wrapping fudge for your grandpa sometime in December- you choose. Either way, you’re finished with a customized, fabulous, stash busting, handmade gift! YAY! One down, thirty seven to go…

***Shared at it’s so very creative monday and a soft place to land DIY day.