68: easy hooded towel for babies

Turns out the best place to find your card reader is the last place you blogged from! It wasn’t even hiding.

Time for another baby project (are your surprised?)!! Lately I’ve been fluctuating between the nesting urge to sort and organize everything, and the desire to work on the long list of projects that are waiting – today projects won!

Hooded baby towels aplenty in Babies ‘R’ Us and Sears, however I’ve heard from a number of people that they are really thin and wear out pretty quickly. I decided I wanted to try making my own and scoured the internet looking for a good tutorial. Infarrantly Creative has (what seems to me) the best tutorial for making a basic hooded towel, and I followed her steps pretty closely. The pictures and description below should be enough to help you create your own towel, but check out her site if you get stuck!

Start with a bath and hand towel in whatever colours you’d like, and give them a good wash to make sure the colours won’t bleed.

Next, cut 10 inches from the short end of the hand towel – preferably the end with the pattern. Fold in half with right sides together and sew the rough edge closed.

Use a zig-zag stitch for all of your seems to add extra strength. Once you’re working with multiple layers of material, it may be easier to do a straight stitch first and then go over it with a zig-zag. I bent a needle trying to get the thick material to feed through because the fibres in the towel kept catching – work slowly!

Next, sew a line straight across at the corner and cut off the extra fabric. Turn the hand towel right side out and you’ve now got yourself a hood!

Next, grab the bath towel and create pleats like I’ve shown above. They are 4” wide, so mark your centre, measure 8” to each side and bring these points in to the centre and pin. The infarrantly creative tutorial said to mark off 4” from centre on each side and bring these points into the centre, but it made for really small pleats and didn’t look like her pictures, so I changed it up a bit.

Sew the pleats together (again, best to do a straight stitch followed by a zig-zag to save your needles!) and then pin the hood on, right sides together. Make sure you’ve matched up the centre of both towels.

Enjoy your finished hooded towel! The colour is a bit wonky here because of shooting in natural light, but you get the idea of how it hangs. It just needs a baby to model it!

Here it is lying open waiting to dry off a little baby body and keep them warm and comfy. It’s a great size if you’re planning on doing any infant massage, and it’s much plusher than any of the infant towels I’ve seen in stores.

Jen

Also posted at Transformation Thursday. Check out the Shabby Chic Cottage blog for other great DIY projects!