How to Finish Tea Towels From Spoonflower

If you are inexperienced at sewing you might be unsure how to finish off tea towels from Spoonflower - it's really quick and simple when you know how, so this tutorial is for you!  There is a great range of tea towel designs available to buy for Spoonflower (I have 3 in my shop including the Toucan design featured in this blog post).  You can purchase them either as a single fat quarter of fabric, or 4 on 1 yard (Linen-Cotton Canvas is the best fabric to choose for tea towels).  When you receive your tea towel you will find it comes as an unfinished piece of fabric, which you will need to sew a hem around to neaten the edges.


To finish the tea towel you will need:
dress making scissors
soft pencil or tailors chalk
ruler
piece of card
iron
sewing machine (and thread!)

Step 1 is to trim the edges, so that you have straight sides to work with.  I use a soft pencil (4B) and a long ruler to draw on the fabric and measure approximately a 1cm border away from the edge of the printed design, before cutting the fabric.

Next you need to turn and press the edges of the fabric - first press 6/8 inch hem on each side, then press a 3/8 inch hem.  You can do this by just carefully measuring with a tape measure or ruler, but I found a great tip online which made this a lot easier! Take a piece of card, A4 size or similar would be good, and draw a line along the long edge 3/8 inch away from the edge of the card and another 6/8 inch away from the edge.  Then use this as a guide for pressing your hem.  I tried this for the first time when I made up this tea towel - it made the job so much quicker! You can keep the card to use again and even add other measurements for when you need to press different sized hems in other projects.

Step 3 is to trim the corners. I've drawn on mine so it's easier for you to see in the photos, you might find it helps to drawn on your fabric too (make sure it's on the back of the tea towel!).  You can see there's a little square between the 3/8 inch and 6/8 inch fold lines.  Draw a diagonal line through this, then cut away the corner.

Then turn back along the diagonal, so the folded corner is at the point of the 6/8 inch pressed edges line.  Then fold back where you pressed the 3/8 inch hem and again along the 6/8 inch hem, so that the raw edges are enclosed inside the hem, and pin.  It should look like this...

Now you can sew! Set your sewing machine to a standard straight stitch (I like to test the stitches are ok on one of the fabric offcuts first). I sewed around the tea towel 2/8 inch from the edge.  Sew right to the edge of the fabric, then go back along your stitching a little way at each corner to turn, then do the next side. Repeat until you are back where you started, snip the threads and tie off the ends.

The tea towel is now ready to use or you could hang it up and display like I this!...