DIY Personalized Dish Towels

My best friend has a lot of really wonderful things happening in her life right now, including the brand new house she bought with her husband! Today is their housewarming party and I wanted to bring them a little gift. Since I'm a stay-at-home mom and we live on one income, we don't have a lot of extra cash. But I still wanted to do something for them, something personal.

April is a designer and their wedding invitations featured a custom monogram of sorts that she designed. I used that idea and the fact that I knew they painted their new kitchen green to make them these custom dish towels!


You start with some plain, white flour sack dish towels.

Next, I found a font I liked and created a Word document with a monogram similar to what they had on their wedding invitations. I then cut some freezer paper down to 8.5"x11" and printed the monogram onto the MAT side of the paper. (The freezer paper fed into my printer just fine, but if you're having trouble, you could always print on regular paper and trace it onto the freezer paper.)

With a mat and x-acto knife, carefully cut out the letters.

You just need the negative of the letters, so you can throw the black away, but make sure to save the little white middles of "a"s and "e"s for example.

Take the negative and iron it, glossy side down, onto the dish towel.

With a plastic bag underneath the towel to protect your table, use a sponge brush to fill in the letters, being careful to dab up and down and not paint side to side. I used regular acrylic paint because that's what I had, but I think fabric paint would work even better.

(I forgot to take a picture of this step, so this picture does not actually show it ironed down. Your stencil should be completely adhered to the towel, with no parts sticking up, otherwise, your paint will bleed. And yes, you can use your freezer paper stencil more than once!)

Let the paint dry (I let mine dry overnight) and then peel off the freezer paper.

A butterfly may even come and land on your towel because it is so impressed with your craftiness!

Heat set the paint by using an iron on both the front and back of the painted parts, or by the instructions on your paint.

You're done! I ironed and folded them to make them look pretty,

tied them with some twine for presentation, and voila!

You now have a personalized housewarming gift that barely costs anything to make and is super simple!