Giving (& tea towel tutorial)

We ended up doing Christmas with my family early this year because Steven and I are headed to Arizona on Friday.  So, on Sunday we headed down to Prosser to exchange gifts and have an amazing lunch together.  My mom has this incredible penne pasta recipe with bacon, cream based sauce & lots of Parmesan cheese - oh my!  It is delicious.  We enjoyed ourselves eating way too much pasta and then watching each other open gifts.  I did not bring my camera nor were any pictures taken, but if we did have pictures they would convey messages of, "I love it", "oh, you shouldn't have!" and "how did you know I wanted that?"  

I love giving gifts.  I have never done the love language assessment, but I'm pretty sure my love language is gifts.  I love giving good gifts that I know the person receiving it will just love.  And when someone gives me something special I go crazy.  I just love it.  This year for Christmas, my sister Kristen & I made my mom tea towels.  It was a long process.  Much longer than I thought.  And to make a long story short, it almost didn't all come together.  But, in the end, we prevailed.  I did manage to get some pictures of the tea towels in process.  It was indeed another Pinterest project.  I do wish I had thought to try the technique out a few weeks ago to perfect it, but, as Kristen says, "that's what makes these towels unique!"  Yes, she is right.  They are unique (and quite cute!).  And my mom loved them - because she loves homemade things and she needed new tea towels. 

The towels we made for my mom

Here's the process of how these tea towels were put together.  I found a tutorial here if you want to see how someone else did it.  The magical product I used to transfer the images onto the tea towels was Citrasolv.  Part of the long story is that I spent over 4 hours one day looking for it.  Where did I find it?  The local health food store two blocks from my home.  Go figure.  So if you have a hard time locating some check your local health food/organic stores.  It was a lot cheaper there than what I found online.

I found several images I liked online and had copies made at Office Depot using their laser printers.  This part is important because inkjet printers won't work.  The ink has to set on top the paper which is what makes the laser printers/copiers special. 

Make sure you have tape, scissors, a small bowl, cotton ball, spoon & your Citrasolv handy.  Do not transfer the images with cardboard underneath!  You will get a transfer that looks like this: 

Ugly.  I should've expected that, right?  Anyways, after the cardboard fiasco I ended up putting down a bath towel with a few scrap pieces of paper directly under the tea towel to give me a firmer surface.  Tape the image you want to transfer face down (if you are using an image with words, be sure to flip it first so it doesn't go on backwards).  Then pour some Citrasolv in a small bowl and using your cotton ball, dip it in the bowl and then rub the Citrasolv over the back of the image until you can see it. 

For the smaller transfers with one image, I did the whole thing at once.  For some of the larger ones which had multiple lines or images, I put on the Citrasolv in steps.  After you apply the Citrasolv, use your spoon to burnish, or transfer, the image.  The harder you rub the better it will look.  Make sure you rub the entire image.  I went back and redid the Citrasolv and burnishing steps for each image. 

 Then slowly lift up your image to make sure you got it all.  I could actually peak under a corner for most of mine.  If you like the way it looks then remove the transfer, if you feel it needs a little more, carefully put it back on (this is why tape is important, you can usually lift one edge and not move the transfer a lot) and do some more burnishing.  I will warn you - your hand will get tired. 

And - voila!  You have successfully transfered an image!  These were taken right after I had done them.  See how dark & crisp the images are?  Lovely.  Be sure that you now iron the image to heat set it.  It is an important step (although mine still faded after being ironed). To avoid your ironing board smelling of Citrasolv, put down a towel.  

The next day I finished transferring images onto 9 more towels, washed & dried them and...they all faded.  So sad.  Several were still in somewhat decent condition.  I was able to salvage 8 to give out as gifts.  Bummer, dude.  You can see how much lighter the images got.  They were still cute - just not as dark.  But maybe that's part of the "vintage" feel, right?

These ones turned out so light that they didn't get gifted.  The deer on the far right were just as dark as the nest two images above right after the transfer.  Bummer!

Then I went to Kristen's and we added ribbon!  Cue 5 hours of measuring, cutting & pinning.  It probably shouldn't have taken us that long, but her work space wasn't exactly in working order.  We used scrap fabric to put a border of sorts on several of them & then finished off with some ribbon.  I'll make a long story short again by saying that there was a lot of hand stitching to hide seams.

Here's the finished products!  I can post these on here before Christmas because my mom already got hers and the others are for Nana & Steven's mom, both of whom do not have internet (or at least don't read my blog).  I'm hoping that even if the images continue to fade that the ribbon and fabric will keep them cute for years to come.  

These are going to Arizona to Steven's mama

These lovely towels will be gifted to my Nana

Next time, if there is a next time, I would probably use a more tigthly woven tea towel.  These were flour sack, and though they weren't bad the fact that it was a loose weave may have contributed to the fading of the final product.

So there you go!  A mini tutorial.  If you happen to take on this project, please come back and let me know how it went.  Especially if you can figure out how to not get the images to fade so badly!  I would really appreciate that tip.  I'm not sure if I will make these again - if I do probably not with the fabric and ribbon.  Maybe just ribbon?

What are you giving for Christmas?  Any homemade projects going on out there for gifts?  Inspire me!