Easy Bath Towel Wrap

Here is another project for a friend. This one is a nice little tutorial. I love doing them because I love finding a good one myself. Especially easy ones and this one certainly is. It's also cheap and probably the fastest thing I have ever sewn!

My friend's little girl is having her 10th birthday party this weekend and they are doing a spa party, so for the favors she wanted to make bath wraps for all the girls. How cute, huh. This friend of mine does know how to sew infact, she is quite good at it. She just likes to have someone there to help her not make a mistake. See those lovely Roman Shades in the background? Yep, she made those with a tiny bit of help from me to understand the directions. She did a great job.

So anyway, back to our project. This towel was the perfect size and it was bought at Walmart for $1.97 and the elastic was $0.97. Cheap! I told you.

You will need: 

1 towel

3/4 inch elastic

3/4 inch velcro

Now, let's get started. First, you need the chest measurement around the person who will be wearing the wrap. Write that one down and save it. Her daughter was 24 inches. Write that down and save it for later. We wanted the wrap to be about a 4-5 inch overlap so we just took the measuring tape and measured where it looked good. No science here. Then to get the gather in the towel, take your measurement and multiply it by 1.5, this will now be how big you want the width of your towel to be. It will give you the perfect gather.

Next measure the length. She wanted 24 inches. This towel was just at that so we thought it would be ok if it was a little shorter. So, no cutting and no raw edges for our project! Awesome!

Take one long edge of the towel and fold it down so you have 1 1/4 inches over. Pin and sew about 1/4 inch from the edge of the fold. Then, if you want, zig zag along the edge. You won't see it in the terry cloth and from the inside it makes the edge stay smooth against the towel. A very nice finish.

Now back to that first measurement. Her little girl was 24 all the way around. Take that and subtract about 2 inches for stretch. We want the towel to be tight and not fall off, but we don't want it too tight. Cut your elastic, (for us that should be 22 inches.) Then safety pin it and feed it through.

Feed it till it is about 4 inches from the edge and sew the elastic in place. See in this picture how we sewed it on the edge, DON'T do that. You don't want the velcro where the elastic is. Push it 4 inches first then sew. Now when you get to the other side, feed the elastic all the way through, take the safety pin off and push it back in 4 inches and sew in place again.

Too bad I don't have a picture for the velcro step. Don't I always forget a picture?! Let's just forget about that and move on... Now, take your velcro, put the fuzzy one on the top piece facing in and the scratchy one on the piece that is facing out just incase of growth. That way if one side touches the skin, it will be the fuzzy. Pin and sew - you are done!

Very cute, but I know, plain. Here is what you can do to make it cuter... You can tie-die them, that would be very cute or embellish them with ribbon or ric-rac. You can monogram them or buy a cute towel for a little more and make one with that. If you buy a cute towel, you will have to find one the right measurements or do some cutting. This was just a trial one. My friend is very good at doing a practice item before the real thing. I on the other hand am very bad at that.

If you decide to make some of these, share a picture, I'd love to see how you made them cute.

Kristen

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