Hooded Towel Tutorial

Lately I have been making a lot of these hooded towel things for birthday, baby shower and just regular 'ole gifts. No lie, they are the simplest things on earth to make but kids love them! Since I sorta use a mash-up of a couple different tutorials, I decided to combine them here -- mainly because it always takes me 20 minutes when I first get started trying to find the multiple tutorials I use and then switching back and forth throughout. Well, no longer! Here's my version of the hooded towel tutorial. Hopefully someone else will get some use out of it too but if nothing else I know it's gonna make my life easier in the future.

Hooded Towel Tutorial

Supplies: 

1 hand towel 

1 large bath towel 

Matching Thread 

Scissors 

Directions: 

First take your two towels. This one is for my niece who likes sky blue at the moment but go crazy with your color choices.

Cut the hand towel approximately 24" long. If it is a little shorter or longer, that's just fine. 

Then fold the hand towel down the short side (like a hamburger, not a hot dog) 

width-wise with right-sides together. 

Stitch down the right and left sides. Do not stitch the open end where you see the raw edges of the towel.

Turn hand towel right-side out.

Take the corner of the hand towel that I am pointing to in the picture above and tuck it into the opposite corner. 

Once you have tucked the one corner into the other, your hand towel will look something like this.

Then open up your hand towel and you have formed the hood!

Put your hand towel aside and grab your big towel. 

Trust me when I say this next part will not make much sense (at least it didn't to me) until you've got a towel in your hands and you're pinning and sewing away. But just go with it, I promise it works!

Find the center (width wise) of the large towel and mark it. Next measure 4" from the center to one side and mark it with a pin. Do the same on the other side. So you should have something like this.

Using the four inch marks as a guide, grab one pin and pull it towards the middle pin. Straighten the top so that you now have three mini layers and pin in place. Do the same for the other side. Now you have a pleat!

Using a straight stitch, sew your pleat in place.

Next grab your hood (the hand towel), center it, and pin it to the center of the bath towel. Make sure the nice folded part of the pleat faces the outside of the towel.

Now we sew these two bad boys together. Since there are many thick layers here, I suggest going over everything with a straight stitch first to make sure you catch all the layers, then go over it several times with a zigzag to catch all the stray threads and to finish it off pretty-like.

Once finished, your edge should look about like this. Probably yours will be better though since I am not at all an expert sewer.

And voila! You are done. Pop it on your resident 4 year old to test and then wrap it up and ship it off! 

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?