Hooded Swimming Towel Tutorial

My first ever craft tutorial - how exciting!


One positive to come out of this disgusting summer weather, is that beach towels are on special offer everywhere - so to make the most, I have spent the grand sum of around a tenner on 2 large beach towels and 2 small hand towels.  A quick trawl of other tutorials and I was ready to cobble together a few different methods to come up with this (very basic) bit of sewing.

1) find a hood that seems to fit your child about right.  Fold the small hand towel in half.  I wanted to have the edged parts at the front of the hood, because I thought it would look nice, and because it would save me hemming the front parts.

2) Draw around the hood, then cut it out leaving a reasonable seam allowance - around 2 cm

3) Sew up the seam

4) zig zag stitch the raw edges of the hem down to neaten and prevent towel bits shedding

Check the hood fits your child  ;) .....

5) Fold your big towel in half down the long side so it is half as long, then fold in half again the other way for you to make the neckline.  Make the neckline just a smidge wider than the width of the finished hood folded down the seam (does that make sense?)

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Basically, don't do what I did, which was cut the neck hole before you make the hood, because it could be ok - see Josephs......

........or it could be significantly too wide, requiring a bit of a bodge when it comes to sewing up

6)  Start by pinning the middle seam of the hood to the centre of the head hole at the back - find it again by folding in half

 7) Work your way round, pinning until you reach the front - leave a gap of around 5 cm between the two edges of the hood at the front

8) Take your scissors and snip about 5 -10 cm down the centre at the front - you don't need  it too far down as the opening should be generous enough to get over damp heads anyway, it just seemed to finish it nicely.  You can cut a wedge shape out, or just go straight down and remove some of the material at the upper part - you'll neaten these later

9) Sew up the hood into the neck opening.  Useful tip - where the corner of the towel has about a million layers of fabric at the bottom of the front edges of the hood, don't bother trying to stitch through it - just snip it off.  Job done.

10) zig zag stitch the seam down into the body of the towel to neaten the edges and as you go round, make sure you zig zag stitch the v-neck opening too.

And there you have it ...................TA DAH!!!!!

And here's one that Emmy took of me working on the towels in my craft space in the loft.  Unbelievably this is the tidy version of the loft.......