Easy Hooded Towel

Hooded towels are a wonderful thing. However, if you're anything like me, you've discovered that babies grow out of them well within their first year, and it can be hard to find big-kid hooded towels. The Company Store has a lot of cute ones, but they're out of my towel-price range. Pottery Barn Kids has some simple ones, but they only come in the PBK colors which make me crazy: light pink, dark pink, purple, blue, green. Come on, people! Am I the only one who wants my girls to know there are more colors in the rainbow than pink and purple? I imagine I'm not.

Enter Joann. Joann fabric, while not my go-to for quilting cottons (I'm a snob who prefers modern fabric designers' lines) is a great place to find other sewing supplies. Like, for example, many colors of solid terrycloth. A few months back I got a bright turquoise that turned into this towel:My daughter chose the fabric for the embellishment from my stash. I also let her choose what shape to sew on. She wanted hearts, and she specified that she wanted different sizes. I ironed fusible stabilizer to the back of the applique fabric. This was plenty to help the fabric hold it's shape while sewing and has actually kept the hearts from fraying at all.

The shapes are sewn on with a zigzag around the edge, and the whole towel is trimmed with pre-made bias binding. You could also just hem the terrycloth, but I like the addition of a contrasting color.
I just made this one as a gift (pretend to be surprised if it arrives in your mail). It's the same basic design as the turquoise one above, just with a different applique. I took some process photos this time, in case you're curious about how-to.

The towel itself is a 45" x 36" rectangle. You could buy one yard of terrycloth and make a plain towel. Or, get 1 1/3 yards to make one with a hood.

The hood is an 11 1/2" x 23" rectangle.
Trim one long edge with your binding, and sew on any applique where you want it. After the hood is sewn folded it's much harder to maneuver in the machine.
Fold the hood in half so the short sides meet, right sides together. Sew a zigzag seam opposite the side with the binding. Turn right side out, and poke the corner of the hood out with any blunt tool.
Trim your entire large towel rectangle with binding. Find the center of a long side, and line it up with the seam of your hood. Overlap the hood edge on top of the towel edge. Sew together.Add any additional applique to the large rectangle either before or after attaching the hood. I like to sew it on after so I can see how the layout will work with the applique on the hood.

As an alternative, you can easily use pre-made towels and just add your own hood. Last week, a friend came over for help turning some plain, but adorable, space-print towels into hooded ones for her almost-one-year-old. These towels were all from Kohl's and T J Maxx, making the materials cost for 3 hooded towels about 15-20 dollars.

We cut three 11 1/2 x 23 inch rectangles out of a plain white towel to make the hoods. As a way to unify the white hood with the blue towel, we attached some scrap stars to the hood just as the hearts were attached earlier. Here's the finished product:

This is a great way to make hooded towels that coordinate with your linens, if coordination is your kind of thing. They're adorable, if I do say so myself.