DIY Embroidered Tea Towel

Hey friend-os! Today I'd like to share a DIY for embroidered tea towels. I know, the picture made you think we were talking ice cream today, but no. We're talking tea towels!

I had picked up a couple of plain tea towels earlier in the week and knew I wanted to embroider them, but didn't necessarily have a good plan in mind for what I wanted to embroider. So, as I was sitting in the kitchen with my head in the freezer (seriously. My place was swelteringly hot.), I started thinking about rainbow sherbet and how awesome it sounded. Then I started thinking about how awesome rainbow sherbet colors were and decided that would be a great color scheme for my project!

So I had the colors figured out, but still no idea what to embroider. I thought I might try out using this cute ice cream cone stamp I got recently, but decided it was too small. Around this time, I realized how ridiculous it was to be in the kitchen with my head in the freezer, and went into the bathroom to get a cold washcloth to put around my neck. That's when the inspiration struck! My bathroom has darling hexagon tiles for the flooring, so I decided to borrow from that motif and create a cute little hexagon border on my tea towels.

Here's how to make them!

First up, supplies! You'll need:

• A tea towel
• A hexagon template
• A pencil or sewing marker. I used a ballpoint pen, but this is not a good idea. I was just too hot to search for my one remaining pencil that has likely been stolen by my cats.
• An embroidery hoop
• An embroidery needle
• Embroidery floss in 3 colors. Preferably rainbow sherbet colors, but you do you.
• Scissors 

Begin by tracing hexagons into a honeycomb formation onto your tea towel. You'll be making a border, so I suggest having the hexagons 2-3" up from the bottom edge. Rows 1, 2, and 3 were constant, but I occasionally left out the hexagons in the row 4 to create an interesting pattern.

When you're done tracing, you should have something that looks like the picture above.

Next, put your tea towel into your embroidery hoop and start embroidering! You'll want to backstitch around the perimeter of each hexagon.

Backstitching is real easy. You can get a decent sense of how it works from looking at the picture above, or you can check out this tutorial to learn how!

When your first hexagon is complete, you should have something that looks like this! Keep going!

Look at all those cute little guys. I did my top and bottom most row in orange, the second row down in mint green, and the third row down in pink. That way, you won't have two hexagons of the same color right next to each other and you get a nice mix of them all together.

Once you've made it through all your hexagons, give your tea towel a good press.

And hey, if it's too hot to iron, forget it! A few wrinkles never hurt anyone. Particularly not when there's rainbow sherbet to be had!

Til next time!

-Becca

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