Who’d have thought creating a floral, 100% cotton tea towel could be so much fun?
I’d been thinking about using some of my original watercolour paintings as designs for fabric tea towels for a while and it was at the end of last year that I decided to give it a go.
I found the design that I wanted to turn into a tea towel fabric, my watercolour agapanthus design. I’d painted it in preparation for a larger piece of commissioned art that I’d been asked to do, and it seemed like a good design to start with.
After searching online I discovered the brilliant people at www.prinfab.com. They enable you to upload your artwork designs and change the repeating pattern from half and quarter brick horizontal and vertical, to mirror, herringbone and magic - the possibilities seemed endless and so exciting.
From there you choose the type of fabric you want and how many linear metres - different from normal metres, oh how much I’ve learned. I started off with a small, fat quarter swatch, to a whopping 10 linear metres, wrapping the fabric around me like a blanket.
Then I enlisted the help of my mum and her trusty hand crank Singer sewing machine. I’d iron over the four edges so they could be double hemmed, and mum sewed them all, adding in my care label that I’d had made up - again via a brilliant company I found online.
Complete with care labels
And hey presto, we had made our 100% cotton tea towels, all handmade and printed in the UK. There’s something very lovely about seeing a design go from paper to fabric.
I had lots of orders over Christmas and then more in the New Year and leading up to Mother’s Day.
Some customers have said they love their kitchen tea towels so much they don’t want to use them. I’ve suggested they frame them for some affordable kitchen art.
Who wants to dry up anyway?