Repurposed Tea Towels

These are dishtowels from Crate and Barrel. I had two each of Christmas Skating on the left and Christmas Trucks on the right. There are only so many dishtowels you can have and the print on these is so large and graphic I wanted to show it off rather than being stuffed in an overcrowded drawer or crumpled and wet on a towel bar. Once before, in my post from 6/9/19, I'd made a pillow from a pair of robot-themed tea towels bought at a tech museum gift shop. I decided to repeat the process with these heavy weight linen Christmas towels. 

In an upper corner was a diagonal band for use as a hanging loop. I opened up the edge just a bit and slipped out this band from each towel, removing it to reduce the bulk. In another corner was a label. I kept that in because it was light weight and I liked that it preserved the source, Crate and Barrel, and cited the name of these towels.

Since I had two of each graphic, I would make two pillows out of the four towels. Serendipitously the size of the dishtowel is the same as a standard size bed pillow.  Rather than make two different pillows, I chose to make two pillows alike each with the front and the back a different towel. That way they can be displayed the alike or different on a bed or couch. The first step in the process was adding a zipper to the bottoms.

I left the turned under edges as is and seamed the towels wrong sides together thus treating the edges as a small flange. I stitched directly over the line of stitches already there. The pale aqua of the Skaters and the pale gray of the Trucks were sufficiently close I could use the same aqua and gray thread color combination. (In the robots pillow, I had switched out the top stitch thread color.)  Here is the pillow cover with a standard size bed pillow inserted. Newer plumper pillows will fill it out better but this is the extras I had on hand. This was a cheerful and simple project. I love that the artistry of each print is now shown off to better advantage.

Closing with a blast from the past.... this is my then four-year old grandson. He turns 10 this July.

O's (with X's)

Monthly, I get together with a small group of quilters called the Cut-Ups. Each month we make a quilt for charity from a block pattern one of the members picks. For my assigned month of September, the block I chose was from this O-Strip pattern by Gudrun Erla. I liked the colors it was shown in — or maybe I was just not in a creative mood — but I asked the ladies to make one or two blocks in red or gray or black. I provided the background fabric and the instructions for one block. 

The sides of the O were from 2½" x 7½" rectangles and the top and bottom were from 2½" x 4½" rectangles. I asked the ladies to not trim when they added four outermost corner sew-n-flip triangles of the background fabric. I cut off the corners myself when I got the blocks back and made half-square triangles with the trimmings. Each O block yielded four HSTs which I made into pinwheels. I had 18 blocks which I joined in three columns of four blocks each and two columns of three blocks each interspersed with the pinwheels.

I had to finagle a bit, nipping in a few horizontal seams to make columns equal height. After all, not everybody's ¼" is exactly the same, and the variations do accumulate. I filled in the top and bottom of the pinwheel columns with rectangle of a background fabric of fitting height. Four 1½" wide vertical sashings separated the five columns. I had enough background fabric to make 3½ " wide borders all around. Actually, my border width was determined by how much background fabric I had and not vice-versa.

The backing contenders were selected from combining a collection of eleven lengths of grays (9½ yards total) I had from a shopping spree focused on purchasing grays at the 2022 Houston Quilt Festival and four other shops in Texas: Creations, One Quilt Place, Things In a Room, and The Quilted Skein. The grays on the back of the O's quilt were those I had deselected and decide not to use in my Tipus and Treetops quilt in September of 2023. See? I knew I would find a use for these other grays and repurpose them somewhere else. The O's backing uses three grays.

For the binding I joined together lengths of red, black, and gray. The binding is ready to go. Off to the far right is a closer look at the background fabric of the top.

This post was started February 14th after I had assembled the top, made the binding, pieced the backing, and layered the quilt. Then the quilt sandwich - and the post - just sat in limbo. As of today, I am back working on this O's quilt. I've begun using the Handi-Quilter Swish Template template for the FMQ. I've also included a sneak peek of part of the quilt back. But for now I plan to quilt, not blog. With my "Sew JO" back in motion since my 3/26/25 Renewing MOJO post, I want to keep up my momentum — better yet, my "sewmentum"