Turn Basic IKEA Towels Into Beautiful Kitchen Decor You'll Love
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Basic hand towels usually don't get much attention in the kitchen, but with a little embroidery, even the simplest towels can become charming and personalized decorative accents. Affordable and basic, IKEA's HILDEGUN Dish Towel is the perfect blank canvas for a creative stitching project that can add warmth and personality to a space.
One of the biggest advantages of using this towel is its simplicity. The white color and minimal design make it suitable for many kitchens and for pretty much any design. It's made of 100% cotton, a fabric of choice for many beginner and experienced embroiderers alike. Plus, at 99 cents, it's incredibly budget-friendly as well, perfect for if you're just starting out.
Once you have one (or a few) dish towels to embroider, you need the crafting materials. If you're starting from scratch, an embroidery kit like the Cyanfour Embroidery Kit includes a variety of needles, hoops, floss colors, how-to guides, and fabric pieces. Or, you can buy one of these Etsy embroidery kits, perfect for a new craft project, which come with embroidery supplies and a design that you can transfer to the dish towel. If you just want the bare minimum for this type of project (which would be an embroidery hoop, embroidery needle, and embroidery floss), you can generally grab these items at a dollar store or craft store for a very affordable price. Then, you can make your own adorable mood-boosting decor with these materials.
A bit of embroidery can take basic IKEA dish towels to the next level
While you can absolutely freehand a design, having a guide is much easier. With such a light fabric, you can get away with sketching your design onto the towel with a pencil or pen. Even better is a water-soluble pencil like the Clover Water Soluble Pencil. The pencil markings disappear with water, so you can wash them away after you're done embroidering the design. It's also possible to print a design with a product like New Brothread Water Soluble Embroidery Stabilizer Paper. Draw or print your design on the paper, stick it to the embroidery project, and once you're finished embroidering, rinse away the paper.
@costa.atelier quick and easy hack from IKEA – hand embroidery on kitchen towels 🧑🍳 #handmade #embroidery #ikeahack
An embroidered dish towel also makes for a wonderful gift, whether you use it as an affordable gift for a friend who is extra, or monogram initials as a sweet wedding present. There's also no need to use the finished project as a dish towel. In general, this is a good way to get a cheap piece of fabric for embroidering. While you can find cheaper fabric options out there, for example, by thrifting fabric or a bedsheet and cutting it to size, you would also need to finish the edges to keep the fabric from fraying. These dish towels already come with finished edges, ready to display or use. If you end up wanting to display your project as art, you can mount it in a traditional frame or upcycle an embroidery hoop into a frame.