I needed new tea towels for the kitchen. Do you realize it is EXTREMELY difficult to find plain old cotton dishtowels nowadays?
Most of the ones I found were thick terrycloth fabric which are absorbent but I find that they leave lots of fuzz on the dishes when I dry them. Yep, I hand dry dishes ..... no dishwasher here folks. Had one once, will never have another one.
So in my hunt for tea towels that were absorbent, didn't leave a ton of fuzz on the dishes when I dried them and were pretty and old fashioned, I decided to make my own! Decorate my own that is.
Hunting in the kitchen section of our only large department store in town ..... I won't name the store ..... many people hate it, I found some plain white flour sacks. Yippee! Just what I needed and they were cheap too! $1.97 for two.
Having a few ideas in my head, I logged onto Pinterest to look at photos of what I wanted. Now I would love to have a weeks worth of pretty embroidered tea towels but that just isn't going to happen anytime soon and I needed them NOW.
So this is what I did. After giving the tea towels a quick iron ..... no, I normally don't iron my tea towels but I had to this one time so I could continue with the decorating ..... I applied two strips of painting tape. The space between was approximately one inch.
Finding some country red fabric paint in my craft supply stash, I dry brushed the paint in-between the strips of tape. Now I dry brushed the paint on as I wanted the paint to be uneven....faded in spots....as if they were old tea towels, to give them the grain sack look.
After letting the paint dry overnight, I carefully removed the tape and viola! I have new, "old" grain sack looking tea towels. Just perfect. Oh the possibilities of colors I could do and so quickly too! I now have a weeks worth of decorated tea towels that only took me about an hour!
Have a wonderful day and remember to give your loved ones a hug!
