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Monday 4 July 2016

Summer DIY, personalized beach towels

I don't know about your house but around here the kids are frequently at a loss of what to do now they don't have the structure of school to fall back on.  So it's been Pinterest to the rescue around here to keep everyone busy.  This project is two fold because it gave us an afternoon of crafting and provides us with our summer beach towels.  Each child now has their own personalized beach towel with their name so no fighting over "you have my towel" and Mom now knows who's towel didn't get hung up.


We started with cheap white bath towels which I was able to find for $4 each.  When picking your towel try for natural fibers (ie cotton or bamboo) so you will get more vibrant colors when tie dying.  On your towel, using duct tape, spell out your name or message that you would like to appear on your towel. This step did take awhile especially as this step was above the level of some of our participants so Mom got to prep 8 towels.



 Next we took all the towels and spread them on the back lawn and got our die ready.  I bought this kit and we easily were able to complete 12 towels with this one kit.


Next we sprayed various colors onto our towels not worrying about whether or not we sprayed the taped area.  The spraying of the die was something that most of us could handle and was good fine motor practice for all.  If you don't want colored hands you may want to wear rubber gloves, we braved it and had colorful hands until we spent a couple hours in the pool.  It works best if you use your darkest color around the taped off area to provide the largest contrast so your letters show up well.


After the towel is colored to your liking let it dry (we left ours on the grass in the sun), once dry peel tape off to expose your name and leave for 8 plus hours for the color to set.  The next day run the towels through the laundry, washing and drying (in the dryer) so the colors set.


Now your towels are ready to use.  I hope you enjoy making these as much as we did.