Towel Sewing Day

We live in a ward with a lot of babies! With babies come baby showers. With baby showers come thinking of a thoughtful gift. With that comes frustration. With frustration comes either buying something cheap or going over the top and buying too much.

So, several years ago I decided that if I was invited to a baby shower, my Caution-coined gift would be a baby hooded towel. I had received one for K and loved it. And so this "Baby-shower-secret-of-the-trade" was born for me. There's no surprises. If you invite me to your baby shower, this is what you'll be getting.

While at a baby shower, someone always inevitably asks, "Did you make that?!" to which I turn beet red and others who know me well say, Yes, she did." And then someone says, "Will you teach me how to make that?"

When I make these towels, I make them in batches of 4; 2 girls and 2 boys. Then, I'm not sewing a towel every other week and when I am invited, I already have it ready.

Today was
Since I know you're dying to have the instructions, I decided to take pictures along the way as a tutorial for anyone interested. It was a little harder than I expected to get the angles I wanted.

1. Buy 4 white full-sized towlels, 2 hand towels, and 4 rolls of gross grain ribbon (Satin doesn't work well as it is hard to sew.)

2. Cut the hand towel in half so that it looks like this:
3. Lay it "right" side up and measure and cut enough ribbon to cover the "strip" on your hand towel.

4. Pin it down, tuck under the ends of the ribbon, and sew the ribbon onto the "strip".

5. Now, fold the hand towel so that it looks

6. Pin it and sew along

7. Now, fold the hand towel in half

8. Your hood is complete. Set the hand towel aside for a minute.

9. Measure, cut, and pin enough ribbon to cover the two strips on each end of your full-sized towel.

10. Fold your full sized towel in half to find the center of it. Take the hand towel and pin the back, bottom edge of it onto the top, center edge of the full-sized towel. Here's a picture to try to explain that.

11. Use your leftover ribbon on the spool to tie it up with a bow.

And just like that, you're done. It makes a great gift!
Here's my four from today...and I'm all set for about a month ;)