Stenciled Tea Towels {Guest Post}

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There are few projects on my list that I been there forever. For some reason, they just never make it to the “to do” stage. Meredith tackles one of them by sharing all the details of how to make stenciled tea towels.

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Hello, lovely readers! My name is Meredith, and I am thrilled to be visiting you today from unOriginal Mom.  Just Us Four is one of the first blogs I stumbled upon as a brand new blogger and I have been following Shannah ever since!

I have a simple and versatile project to share with you today – some stenciled tea towels!  A quick Pinterest search will yield lots of inspiration for you…monograms, designs, quotes, and more.  I picked up these flour sack towels from Walmart for a few bucks, knowing I wanted to try my hand at some, but they sat in a closet for a few months until I got a crafting itch one afternoon and remembered they were on my to-craft list!

So I pulled them out and whipped up a freezer paper stencil using my Silhouette.  I love using freezer paper to stencil things on fabric – it irons on to create a temporary bond with the fabric, so you don’t get any bleeding…but peels right off when you’re done with no problem!  If you don’t have a Silhouette to cut a custom stencil, you could still use freezer paper for a less intricate design and cut it by hand or with an exacto knife.  You could pick up a generic stencil from the craft store to use, too, or keep it really simple with some solid straight lines and use masking tape or painter’s tape!

I used acrylic paint mixed with fabric medium, so these towels will hold up well to washing. (Make sure to follow the instructions to heat-set your paint when you use fabric medium.) I may have gotten a little ambitious with the multi-color herringbone design…it was a bit tedious to carefully paint all those little squares with a foam brush without getting over the lines.

But I love the end result! An extra coat would have made the colors clearer, but I like the vintagey look of the one-coat sponge paint.

These are really simple to make, and so inexpensive, too! The best part is, you can bundle them up as gifts for any occasion. Put them together with a bottle of wine for a hostess or house warming gift…in a gift basket of kitchen goodies for a wedding or bridal shower gift…or you could even make a set as a teacher gift!

I will be the first to admit to you that I’m not the most original person in the world…but I love being inspired by great ideas and putting my own spin on them to make them my own. Come on over to my blog, unOriginal Mom, to see more! Or you can follow along via Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram for more inspiration. 

Thanks so much to Shannah for allowing me to come share with you today! Have an inspired day!

~Meredith