Tom gave me a challenge a couple of weeks ago: get some new kitchen towels and embellish them to match our table linens. I do believe in stealing ideas, so I went on-line to see what other people have done. I found someone who bought plain white kitchen towels and sewed their own material to "personalize" them. They sewed a five inch strip from one side to the other and then sewed a two-inch contrasting piece both above and below the larger strip. It looked easy, was within my capabilities and was totally cute. I decided to do the same. I went to Target and bought some white kitchen towels. When I got them home I looked at them more closely and noticed that the edges of the towels had a rather thick hem and I didn't think that it would work to sew pieces of material onto those hem. It would be way too thick. So I did what I normally do: I changed my plan. Since I didn't want to sew anything onto the thick hem, I would sew material up to the hem. It would look too funny to then have the white hem out on the edge so diamonds would be a good idea. This meant that I was going to have to actually do a little math. The towels were 14.5" from one hem to the other. I wanted four diamonds sewed on. I had to figure out how wide each diamond would have to be to fit without any overlapping. After some calculating, I needed each diamond to be 3 7/8" across after the seam allowance. I cut out the diamonds and pinned them onto all four towels before sewing any of them. It took me quite awhile to do the pinning in order to get everything lined up right. I discovered that during the sewing process, there was a little bit of shifting, but for the most part the diamonds ended up pretty up where they were supposed to.
And I STILL have more of that material left!!
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