Upcycled towel bathmat

(I’ll announce the giveaway winner on Thursday, so there is still time to leave a comment on yesterday’s post for your chance to win.)

 Today I am writing a tutorial for the idea that solved one of the splashiest places in our house: the kids’ bath. They are still little enough that they have most of their baths together, meaning that the splish-splash fun is multiplied by a quotient of sibling silliness.

When we were staging our old house for sale, I purchased a new shower curtain and towels in bright stripes and solids. I love how cheerful and fun they are, but they also relegated our previous soft green and purple towels and their accompanying rugs and bathmat to a box destined for charity. We’ve survived without one but “bathmat for the kids” has been on the top of my “to craft” list since the start of the year. When I mapped out the projects I wanted to tackle for Make-Do March, I knew that it was time to finally cross this off (for an explanation on Make-Do March, see the bottom of this post.)

See that spot below? That is the space that needs a bathmat for my little splash monsters. And it is just about the size of a towel folded in half (our previous solution.)

We have some very old towels from The Daddy’s bachelor days and I decided that this one, with its big hole, was ready to be upcyled into new bathmat glory. The dimensions I went with were 30″x15″. This meant that with the towel folded in half width-wise I only had to trim right above the hole to get the right dimensions. Remember, cutting terry cloth is VERY linty business. Little white fuzz everywhere again. Using the rotary cutter doesn’t seem to make that any less the case, unfortunately. I used a double thickness of the towel for extra absorbancy and a softer place to kneel while scrubbing behind little ears, but you could do just one thickness and either use a smaller towel or make two bathmats.

I have seen a bathmat tutorial where they essentially made a fancied up towel but I wanted something with more color for the bright and fun bathroom. Last month I found this Heather Bailey print on sale. The colors matched and I liked adding the curvy pattern to the mix. I cut a piece to match the size of the towel, 15″x30″. If you’re buying fabric and using my dimensions, that means you could easily do this with a half yard of fabric.

It was once again time to make more bias tape. If you wanted to sew the fabric to the towel right sides together (leaving an opening to turn it) you could definitely skip using the bias tape and do this even faster. Probably with top stitching and some quilting once it’s turned to keep the layers in place. I’m thinking I may do that version for our master bathroom.

I decided on yellow gingham bias tape for this. If there had been a good orange or pink in my stash I would have done that instead to pull in more colors from the shower curtain.

Using my big quilting safety pins I connected all three layers for quick quilting. Because the print was so curvy I decided to just run a straight stitch up along  every fourth row. I did have colorful thread in my stash so I got a bit of color by using a bright pink thread.

After that was done it was time to pin the bias tape in place. You can see the stitched rows here. I also left the outermost safety pins in place until after the bias tape was stitched down to make sure the layers stayed in place.

After stitching the bias tape from the back I trimmed the corners and any extra fabric (more fuzzies everywhere!) and sewed the bias tape to the front with orange thread. I wish it were easier to see in the pictures, but I like the hint of color.

Now it’s in place and ready to be splashed on! I am so happy with how it turned out.

Here is the other DIY piece in the kids’ bathroom.  It was a knock off project based on these duck cards from Ikea. Photographing a trio of our ducks in front of one of our towels and using an existing frame gave me instant matching bath art.

Here are the duck stars in place on the Ikea tins we use to store Girlie’s hair accessories.

Stool, I have plans for you as well!

Here’s the space. I’m pretty sure that this is the only room in our house that I would mark as “complete.” We have so much decorating left to do and I am slightly paralyzed at the thought of putting nail holes in the walls. I feel like I must have a total vision for the space and know just where I want things beforehand.  In the meantime, we have mostly empty walls. Oh well, I’ll get there.

Happy Sewing!