Friday 15 January 2010

Hearts and Torchons

Last summer I bought some old French tea towels (torchons) at a brocante. So big they were impossible to use and I only bought them for the lovely old fabric. But how to use them? I already had lots of old French sheets in Linen and linen/cotton mixtures to use for embroidery, so I needed another idea.

The torchons are HUGE - literally twice the size of 'normal' English ones, and thereby came the idea - why not make two, yes TWO 'normal' teatowels out of one torchon. So, I washed them (the stallholder had starched them to within an inch of their lives), dried them, pressed them and cut them in half.

They had rolled edges, hand-stitched, so I did the same to the cut edges. Voila - two new tea towels. With the addition of a heart of Laura Ashley delphinium-patterned cotton they were given a new lease of life. I machine stitched the heart on and added some fancy hand-stitching to make it a bit different. I like them a lot.

2 comments:

Jason Fist said...

Great idea. Very clever reworking!

Floss said...

Penny, you are a genius. I have been using the two I bought as tablecloths under our coffee machine, but I can see a new use for them now...