1 Yard Projects Session 3: Towel Toppers

Another fun kitchen project to make is a towel topper. Now this is also something that hangs on the front of your oven, so you might have a little bit of competition with that hot pad you just made, but I think there'll be room for both of them. So what this is, is you just take a towel and we're gonna make this fun little topper, that's gonna make it look like a little dress. This, if you were to imagine your oven, is where the handle of your oven would be. So this is going to go around the handle of your oven. And then I'll talk about different ways that you can actually secure that with buttons or VELCRO or however to actually make it attach to your oven. And then you have your towel. And if you're like me, sometimes you just wanna use the towel to dry your hands real quick, but it does get dirty and you wanna take it out and wash it. So this little topper just has a piece of elastic, so you can take your towel out, throw in the wash, maybe replace it with another towel that matches or anything like that. But it makes it a really fun thing you can use on any towel in your kitchen. So I'm gonna show you how to make this. So first thing you're gonna want to do is download and print out your pattern piece. And this is really the only pattern piece you're gonna need. Everything else is sort of freeform shapes. So you're going to cut two pieces of this pattern piece. And I just used cotton fabric. All of these projects for these sewing for your home one yard or less projects are all made out of cotton, because it's very easy to wash. Since this is gonna be in the kitchen, right under my stove, next to my oven, there's a chance that it could get dirty and I will need to wash it, so I like using just cotton fabric. So I would cut out my pieces. And then I would sort of plan out what I want on my towel. So you can see here that I am thinking about the top of this towel topper looks like the top of the dress. So I want the actual towel to look like the bottom of a dress. And this is a really easy thing to do, just add pockets to it. This can also be a way to dress up an old towel if you don't really wanna throw it away, but for some reason you've gotten it a little bit too close to the heat and you've actually burned a hole in it. So you can make a fun, cute little pocket to cover those up. So those are just squares or rectangles cut, whatever size you want, however many of them you want, and attach those to your towel. And then your towel's ready to go, and you can actually do the topper part. So you have your two pieces that you've cut out. And what we wanna do is finish some edges on them. And then there will be some edges that you don't need to finish because you're actually going to stitch those two pieces together. So what I mean by that is, here's our piece. And we need to finish our upper edges, where we're going to do our closure attachment to secure it to our oven. And we need to do our bottom edge as well, because this is where it's gonna be overlapping the towel, but you're not actually gonna be sewing anything to it. So you're going to need to do a hem on this. I chose to just do a very narrow 1/4 inch double fold hem, because I didn't want to have a really big bulky hem anywhere on here. So I made it nice and narrow. So you can see I just used my hem gauge here. I folded it over and it's a 1/4 inch. And I folded it twice and I have it pinned in place. And all I did was just stitch right down the middle. So I'll just show you how I did this hem. And I'm just going to stitch right down the middle. I am going to do a little backstitch and then go all the way across. Go ahead and take my pins out when I get to them. Last one, all the way over, and I'm going to do quick a little backstitch. And I have the other side of the top of my little dress towel topper that I need to do. So I'm not gonna take this all the way off my machine, cut my threads. I'm just going to lift my needle, raise my presser foot, and slide right over to the next section. It's just a quick, easy way to be able to move from one piece right to the other. And then I can go ahead and stitch right along this one here. Last one. Backstitch, and I'm good to go there. Now, I'm gonna take that off, trim the threads, and we're gonna talk about the bottom. Because there's a couple different ways that you can do the little hem on the bottom. So one way you can do that is to stitch just like I just did the upper sections, and just go straight right along the bottom. Another way that you can do it, and I will bring in our one from the finished towel topper is to do a fun zigzag stitch. And this is something, it's sort of a little subtle element, but I thought it was just fun to add a zigzag stitch around the bottom and the neck edge of the towel topper. That's something you can do. Or you can do just a straight stitch. Since I already have it pinned and it looks just like my other ones, I'm gonna go ahead and just do a straight stitch on this one, but that is an option that you can do. Or maybe you want to use a contrasting color of thread, do some really fun decorative stitching. Any of that you can do as well. Last pin out of the way. Okay. And we've got our upper and lower edges all hemmed up and ready to go. So now, if you are looking at your pieces, so I have my second piece here, as you can imagine, we are going to layer these right sides together, like so, and they are going to be stitched along the side. So these edges don't need to be finished at all. However, you still need to do some sort of finishing to the outside arm hole section of our towel topper, as well as the neck edge. Now for the arm hole section here, you would do the exact same finish that you did for the top on this edge. So this one I have here, you can see I have my double fold 1/4 inch hem on the top and I have it along this section here. So you would do that exactly the same. The neck edge is gonna be a little bit different, and that's because this is kind of a steep curve, and curves can be really tricky to fold over and actually do a hem, especially if you're trying to do a double fold hem, which I probably wouldn't even attempt to do, because that would be kind of tricky. So I'm just gonna do a single fold over hem, and I'm going to zigzag along the edge. And that way it will be finished on the right side. You will still have a little bit of the raw edge on the wrong side, but you're never gonna see that, because it's actually inside your towel topper. So what I'm gonna do is take, you can either use your snips if you got a sharp pair of fabric scissors, I just wanna take and make little cuts right along the edge of my fabric. I'm going about an 1/8 of an inch in and probably every 1/4 to 1/2 along the way, just making little snips as I go, all the way around. And this is what's going to help me actually be able to turn the edge. So now what I wanna do is press under what I'm gonna hem. You could just take this over to your machine, fold it, and start stitching, but it's kind of difficult to work with because it is again such a steep curve. So I want to do a little pressing first to make it easier. So I got my iron turned on, nice and hot. And then I'm going to use my fingers and start turning under. I still wanna have about a 1/4 inch. It can be a little bit less, but all I'm doing is pressing over the edge that I'm then gonna stitch. So you can see with this section, I'm not worried about where this end is at. I'm only focused on what's directly in front of the iron. So as I go along, you can see that I'm aligning what's in front of the iron, pressing it, and then manipulating the rest of the fabric as I go around. If you try and worry about where the hole curve is at the whole entire time, I think you're gonna find it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and you're gonna have a hard time pressing it. But if you just always focus on the bit of fabric that's directly in front of your iron, I think you'll have a lot easier time pressing. We'll give it one more press, maybe even use a little steam. I wanna make sure that stays in place. There. And now I can take it over to the machine and I could do a straight stitch or a zigzag stitch. I'm going to choose a zigzag stitch, because I think that will be a nice, cute touch on the neck edge of our little towel topper. So all I'm gonna do is do a zigzag stitch right along the raw edge of the fabric. So if I think about how a zigzag stitch works, I have one stitch that's gonna go over the raw edge on one side, and then the other one's gonna go back over on the other side. So I'm encasing that raw edge as I go. I'm all the way around, so I'm keeping the raw edge of that fabric right in the middle of my zigzag stitch. I know it's gonna be secured. And again, this is a pretty tight curve. So if you find that you need to stop, lift up your presser foot and adjust your fabric as you go, definitely do that. It's better to take the time to make the adjustments while you're stitching, than have to rip something out or go back and restitch something later on. So again we're just working our way around that curve. Like so. Go ahead and do a little back stitch and my neck edge is done. So you can see, I have a fun, cute little zigzag stitch. I could have done that maybe in some red thread, sort of match with the dress and the towel, and that would have looked kind of cute, almost like a little necklace or something up there. Lots of fun, little things you can do with this project. Okay, so you would have your neck edge done, your top, you would go ahead and do your hem on your sides, and then you'd be ready to actually attach your two pieces of the towel topper. So to do that, all I'm gonna do is lay them right sides together, and we're gonna stitch right along this curved edge. Now this is a little bit wider. This will be hemmed. You will hem this part before you get there. But we are just going to pretend that mine is hemmed, and we're going to stitch our curved edge. So I'll just fold that guy under and get a pin. Grab my pin cushion. Put some pins in place and we will do some stitching. And this is another curved edge. Anytime there's curves involved, I do like placing a couple of pins. I don't want to have to worry about the fabric shifting on me when I'm working with it. I want to know that it's going to stay right where I want it. Okay. Take that over to the machine. And I'm going to sew both of those side seams together. Now I have been sewing two 1/4 double fold hems. So I have about a 1/2 that I'm taking off on either side. So I'm gonna go ahead and sew using approximately a 1/2 inch seam allowance. Now, what I just did was start sewing, and I had left it on my zigzag stitch that I just did. So you don't have to worry about taking it out, ripping it out. That zigzag you just did is gonna be caught in the seam allowance. Simply lift your needle, adjust back to the actual stitch you wanted in the first place, and then you can continue on. So I do wanna do a little back stitch, and then I can actually stitch all the way along this edge. Take my pin out, and we're ready to go Again, if you feel the need to have to stop and adjust to your fabric, raise your presser foot, make any adjustments, do that, while you're stitching. Do that as I get to the curved edges. And do another backstitch at the end, and then we can go ahead and stitch our other side. Right here Again, doing our backstitch. And right along our curved edge. All right. Now, our actual dress part of our towel topper is done. So what I need to do, take my pins out, and then I'm going to be turning this right-side out. So just like any other curved seam that you may have worked with in the past, you're going to want to trim your seam allowance and then cut those same notches that we did in the neck line, along this edge too. You don't have to do quite as many, because it's not quite as curved of a seam, but even just a few will make it lay much flatter when you do turn it right-side out and press it. So especially here in sort of the underarm area, get a few in there, turn it over and do our other side as well. Okay. And then it would be ready to turn right-side out and press, and it would look just like this one here. Now you need to think about how you're going to attach your towel topper to your actual towel. You could, if you wanted to, actually stitch this right onto your towel. You can make it one piece. You can make it really long. Maybe you take the end of your towel, sort of gather it up, put it in there and stitch across the edge, but that's gonna make it permanent. And you're not going to be able to take your towel out and wash it if you ever want to in the future, which I definitely wanna do. So I'm going to make mine removable. And I'm gonna do that by using some elastic. So if we turn this guy inside out, you can see that I have taken just a simple piece of elastic. This is really thin, braided elastic. You don't need much of it and you don't need it to be very thick or heavy. And I've just stitched it to the seam on one side, gone across and stitched it to the seam on the other side. I did that approximately two inches from the bottom of the towel. And I will stitch this side back on. And what I've done is I've raised it up about two inches, because I know that the elastic is going to sag a little bit, whether while the towel is on there or maybe while I'm using it. And I want to make sure that you don't see the elastic hanging down underneath the towel topper. So all I have to do to attach our elastic, is take it over to the machine and you're going to stitch back and forth across it, directly on top of the seam allowance that you've already done. That way, you don't have to worry about seeing it anywhere on the right side. It's hidden right in that seam allowance. So I'm just gonna go forward and back a couple times, and then your elastic is in place. And then just like that, I could turn it back right-side out, and I'm ready to actually put my towel in. Now, I like to fold my towel in half. I want to have the front a little bit longer than the back overlapping it just a little bit. I will just gather it up and then stick it up into the towel topper over the elastic, like so. Get it in place. And then I can take and pull the towel topper down over the top of the towel like that. Get it nice and adjusted, and then I can put it on my oven. So you can see, with this print of fabric I was able to use both my red towel as well as my green towel. If I had blues, sort of yellowish-green colors, any of that would match with this towel topper. I can use it for a bunch of different towels and just change out my towels as I need to wash them. So again, when it comes to the top edge of actually securing your towel topper to your oven, you can do this a bunch of different ways. It's really up to you. You could take and use maybe some sew on snaps. You could use buttons, you could use VELCRO, you could take a piece of ribbon and maybe tie a little bow. You can do anything you want to make it so you can put this on your oven. Obviously, what you need to be able to do is open and close this, so you can actually get it over the handle of your oven, but whichever method you choose to do that is entirely up to you. So I hope you'll give this a try. It's a really fun, easy project, and you can see, you can use it with any towel in your kitchen, and it gives them a completely different look and makes you actually want to hang them on your oven.