dish towels & cloths

I happened upon this little project quite by accident. I found some waffle weave muslin at JoAnn's in the remnant bin and I chucked it into my cart thinking I could use it for something.
I'm so glad that I did! It works perfectly for dish towels and dish cloths.

For a dish cloth:

cut one piece of waffle weave muslin 10" square

cut a piece of fabric (plain old cotton) 2.5" x width of fabric (42")

fold in half lengthwise and iron
this will be used for binding

using a walking foot, attach the binding to the square as you would quilt binding

it should look something like this

hand stitch the binding to the back and you are done!

for the dishtowel, use the same technique but cut a rectangle 17" x 21" from the waffle weave muslin and cut 2 strips of binding fabric instead of one

a few things about this project:

I am not a pre-washer, normally. I did pre-wash the muslin, but I let it air dry. After I used the towel, I washed it and then dried it in the dryer. It shrunk quite a bit. The yellow one was washed and dried. The red one is the original size.

I was surprised that it shrunk so much. So, my word of advice is to wash AND dry the fabric in the dryer before cutting the muslin. I did not pre-wash my binding strips.

And one more thing...if you have an aversion to binding, (I do not) this project is not for you.

I can see doing a whole stack of these for a stand-by gift, because everyone needs dish towels. And if you need dish towels, why not make them pretty, right? And how cute would it be to make some of these for each season?

I am planning to make many, many more of these. Lucky for me, I like binding. :)