Homemade Gift: Dish Towels to Hand Towels

I don't know about you, but at our house, we have little kids who don't pay a lot of attention to the color of towels in the kitchen. You see, we have a certain color and design for our dish towels; everything else (in the kitchen) is a hand towel. It recently came to my attention that my kids were occasionally wiping their hands on my dish towels. Ewwww!!

As a result, I decided to make it easier to distinguish between the two. Now I can tell my kids that the one fastened to the oven door is the hand towel. You can't miss it. :)



I simply used scraps from my scrap bin (that hadn't been cut up into quilt squares yet) for the toppers. You only need small scraps for these.



Then I pulled out my stash of buttons and found coordinating ones.



The last thing I had to do was make the pattern. I can't remember where I read this, but somewhere online a lady recommended using your iron as a template for these toppers. It's perfect!

These towels were a little on the short side, so I went ahead and gathered them at the top to make a longer hand towel. If I were using more traditionally-designed hand towels, I'd gather them in the middle and have both ends hanging down. Of course, you could always cut decorative towels in half and use both ends as separate hand towels; I just like the fullness of using a whole towel in one.

These are super-fast and super-easy. I whipped up the majority of these while I was browning ground beef for a taco supper. Try it - you'll be hooked! :)

When I worked at a small Christian school, one of the ladies used to make these for each of the faculty members as Christmas gifts every year. It's such a small thing to some people, but I really looked forward to a new one each year.

I'm linking to Fiber Arts Monday and