After the very disappointing Target tea towels (although, let’s be honest…what sort of quality was I really expecting from Target?), I did some searching online to see what the best fabric for tea towels was and (more importantly) where to find that fabric. The consensus among tea towel aficionados was that linen makes the best tea towels as it is the most absorbent of the usual fibers. As plain white 100% linen seems to be completely unavailable in Sacramento, I ordered some linen from Fabrics-Store.com last weekend.

What a superb selection they have…too much for me apparently. I had to do more searching to find out what exact weight of linen made for the best tea towels. I’d found one recommendation online for a weight of 5.3 oz./yard and so ordered some of that but also, after browsing through the “Doggy Bag” section of the Fabrics-Store.com website, ordered some slightly heavier (6 oz./yard) material as well.

The order arrived yesterday morning and so I immediately popped it into the washing machine and then hung it out to dry before heading off to work. (Oh, as far as weight goes, I’d order anything between the two weights I got. They’re both very good weights for tea towels.)

After work last night, I ripped the heavier fabric into tea towel-sized pieces and then edge-stitched the towels using one of the fancy stitches available on the sewing machine.

This morning it was time to try out making leaf prints. First up? loquats…

For those who have never seen them, loquat leaves are quite thick and stiff. That might be part of the reason why the ink globbed a bit on that big leaf in the middle. I printed two towels with this pattern and another two using grape leaves.

They’ll hang out to “cure” until tomorrow afternoon when I will heat set the ink with the iron. After that, they’ll have another trip through the washing machine to clean them up a bit (and also to create the edge fringe) then they’ll be ready to use!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under my designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.