Hand Painted Tea Towels: Creating Your Own Design

Hand painted tea towels are an easy way to decor match your kitchen.
In this post, we show you a simple DIY design technique to personalize your linens.

Do you like your kitchen linens to match your room theme?

Here’s a way to DIY a matchy-matchy cooking space.

Say you love vintage tea pots and cups and saucers, but you can’t find any “tea” tea towels because it’s all about coffee in the shops now. I’ve told you before about our little love affair with all things tea. We’ve made special tea bag covers, and shared other tea crafts. We even have a hand painted Valentine Tea Towel DIY and a Christmas Tea Towel DIY design.

So we feel quite ready to help you make your own tea service pattern transfers to paint!

You can turn any sketch or photo into a tea towel design.

Honest.

And you don’t have to buy a fancy design program.

Hand Painted Tea Towel DIY Design

When you choose your a design, collect two or three photos that fit your theme.

Let’s say we go with the vintage tea idea.

I found these pictures on Google Images.  (Since you are not using the photos per se in your painting, you don’t need to worry about copyright issues.)

Supplies:

1. Printed photo in the size you want your finished design.  For a tea towel, a nice design size is about 7″ wide x 9″ or 10″ tall.  This means the picture will be almost as wide as a piece of printer paper.  Print in color or black and white.
2. Printer paper
3. Pencil
4. Gray graphite artist’s transfer paper
5. Flour Sack Tea towels
6. Liquid embroidery hoop or sturdy cardboard and masking tape.
7. Fabric markers

NOTE:   This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase, I receive a tiny bit to help fund my craft habit. So that’s a good thing. Your price doesn’t change.

Create the Hand Painted Tea Towel DIY Design

1. The first step is to trace the outlines of the tea service items to make a line drawing.
2. Make a tracing sandwich: printer paper, top with gray transfer paper, topped with the photo.
3. Trace the outlines only of the tea items, as shown in the image above.
4. Remove the photo and transfer paper from the printer paper.  You now have your basic design.  Clean up the lines a little.  I’m going to make a domed lid for my teapot, since the creamer has a domed lid I like.  Now draw a simple flower design inside your outlines.  This can be your finished design, or you can add a doily under the tea items.

Ready to Transfer DIY Painting Design onto Tea Towels

Your hand painted tea towel diy designs are finished.

You have the tea towels washed, ironed and ready to go. (The directions for washing will be with the Flour Sack Tea Towels order.)

So, next time, we transfer the design on to the Tea Towels and then paint!!

The Hand Painted Tea Towel Design is complete.

Go to Hand Painted Tea Towel Painting Part 2.