Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Simple Trim Burp Cloth


I thought I'd put together a quick "how-to" for how I did this burp cloth. I'm  sure most of you could figure it out for yourselves, but here is what I did anyway.

1. Choose a hand towel or something absorbent that is similar. Mine was an Egyptian cotton hand towel from Target.

2. Choose your cotton fabric trim. You could probably use a sturdy ribbon here instead if you found one you liked.

3. Wash both. (You don't want them to shrink unevenly).

At this point I had to determine where I wanted my trim to sit. My towel had two woven-non-loopy strips across one end, so I figured they would make a good location to stitch my fabric trim to.


4. Measure the width of that you want your fabric to be. Because I was using the two woven strips to stitch it to, mine was 4.5cm wide. Add 5 - 6mm (1/4" for all those not using metric) seam allowance the whole way around. I DID NOT CUT IT TO LENGTH AT THIS POINT.


5. Pin trim to your cloth. Notice I pinned in both directions. That was so I could remove pins along the side I was working on and not have the other side shift. I do not have a walking foot for my machine - so I pinned like crazy - I did NOT want that strip to move through the machine at a different rate to the towel, which has the ability to stretch a little (I had tried to make a towel before, and had to scrap it. My hindsight is 20/20 on that one!).



6. Stitch across the side of the towel/fabric first (short end of the trim) to hold it in place. To turn the corner, simply make sure the needle is down (through the towel) and lift the presser foot. Rotate the towel 90 degrees, put the presser foot down and off you go!

7. Cut the length of the fabric when you are ALMOST at the end. I would say about an inch would do it. I did it this way so that if the fabric and towel did go through the machine at a different rate I wouldn't be left short of fabric trim. Tuck the ends under and "finger press" (i.e. use the warmth of your finger to iron the end under so that it doesn't pop out as you sew the final inch of the long side of the trim).

8. Repeat direction #6.


9. Don't forget to stitch backward and forward over the end of the first threads to lock them all in place.


10. Ta-dah!

Honestly, the ironing and pinning took the longest on this one, they whip up really quickly - and I'm not at all fast at the machine!

Happy stitching!

S xox

1 comment :

  1. thanks for stopping by and for the sweet comments! I'm pinning your trimmed towels because i think that's just what my hand towels need. :-)

    take care,
    jen
    sunnyvanilla.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

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