Crafty Mommy back from haitus

Yes, I've already done two posts today, but since both topics aren't related in the least, I figured I'd just do two separate ones.

Crafty Mommy took a hiatus for a while. Frankly, I forgot I had a sewing machine, except for when I would trip over it going into the closet. So a few weeks ago, my husband mentioned that we needed new bath towels - specifically the hooded ones for the boys because he felt like the toddler-sized ones from the store just aren't really big enough. I had purchased one for B last year at a craft fair that was made with a full-sized towel, but that sucker cost me $25, and I wasn't quite ready to dish out $100 on hooded bath towels. So I went to the wonderful world known as Pinterest because I figured how hard could they really be? And they aren't - one full-sized towel, one hand towel that you cut in half (so technically you could make two towels with two full-sized and one hand towel), and whatever embellishments you want to put on them.

I started off with a trip to Joann's to check out their appliques. I found a handful that I liked - an elephant and a giraffe to keep with our African family theme, some duckies playing with sailboats and some cute little "monsters" that would let me do something a little more colorful. Then off to Target I went to get towels to coordinate with the appliques. My husband works for Target, so between his team member discount, the discount for using their store branded debit card and an additional discount they were offering using their Cartwheel app, I bought four full-sized towels and three hand towels (two of the towels were brown, so since I only needed half a hand towel for each one, I only had to buy one brown hand towel) for probably about $12.

This weekend I sat down and completed the task - sew half a hand towel to the long end of the bath towel, then fold it in half and sew the hand towel across the top to make the hood. Easy enough. The appliques I bought were all iron-on, so that was pretty easy, too. I debated grabbing a sewing needle and thread to reinforce them, but after ironing them on, they seem fine. We'll see how they hold up after a couple of washes. I may need to reinforce them a bit after they take a trip through the spin cycle.

So here's the finished product. Four towels for probably about $35 instead of spending $25 each to buy them from someone at a craft show or on Etsy. Pretty easy and I would even consider making these as gifts at some point, and I'm FAR from the expert seamstress.