Posted by dravon in LiveJournal, Project Review | Comments Off on Monogrammed Towels
Monogrammed Towels
I had been wrestling with ideas on what to do for reception gift favors and waffled around a whole lot. I know these things are supposed to be small and nothing fancy, but I didn’t want to do that. There would only be about 35 people there. As Miles said “most people are expecting a little personalized box with a bite-sized snicker’s in it … not a monogrammed towel!”. I replied “and if we had 150 people coming, you know that they’d get? A little personalized box with a bite-sized snickers in it. But these are close family and friends. I can afford to splurge” (besides, I want to use my embroidery machine! *stomps foot*)
The Item: Finally, I decided on towels. I was thinking fingertip towels, but after looking at bulk purchasing of 3 dozen of them it cost pretty much the same to get the larger guest towels as it would to get the smaller version. So I got the larger. While I wanted a towel without the decorative banding (the non-terry part), I couldn’t find those. The plan was 1 towel per guest, so husband/wife would walk away with a matched set.
| The Designs: With LJ help, the choice of a design was polled and the People Spoke! Excluding my answer, the monogram was a 4-2-2 winner, so the monogram it was. Orginally, I thought the smaller 3″ design would work, but after printing out a sample and putting it on the towel, it just looked too small so I upgraded the design to the 5″ tall letter. The original design was composed of 4 colors, and I downgraded it to 3. The colors in the design were also not to my taste, so I switched them out for shades of almond, chocolate and espresso. Yum! |  |
| The majority of guests were couples, but there were a few singles. I debated about whether or not to give them half of a monogrammed set, or go with something different so that it didn’t look quite so odd to have one towel with a design on it. For the non-couple guests, I used the chocolate thread and did the scroll work design shown. They ended up being gorgous! Well, everything was gorgeous, but the scroll was even prettier than I had anticipated so that was a bonus bonus. hehe. Each design took 45 to 50 minutes to complete. |
Note to self: Pay attention to yardage used on the color chart and make sure to get enough thread of the right color for all items!!!
The Setup: Having been working on the embroidery stabilizer swatch book, I did the terry cloth samplers first. I learned that a heavy-weight but soft permanent cut-away stabilizer on the back was the option of choice. I also learned that terry cloth, given the nap, must have a top stabilizer of some sort to keep the nap down and allow the design to be embroidered neatly. Without this top stabilizer, the nap pokes up through the embroidery and the end result is sloppy looking. I had 2 things I could use as top stabilizer – the water dissolvable one, and the low heat one. I used all of the water dissolving one and switched to the low heat figureing “low heat, that should pill up for easy removal while in the drier”. *sigh* Bad logic, and the untested assumption later cost me big time. Why? … Read the note to get the gist — you don’t need the details of my breakdown after unloading the drier.
Note to self: Don’t use low heat removable stabilizer on material with a nap or in conjuction with a design featuring lots of detail. Why? When using the iron to remove the plastic topping, the topping doesn’t actually go anywhere. Plastic curls up when it melts, so all the edges of the design need to be rubbed on to actually remove the stabilizer. On nappy material, this risks pulling the fabric. On detail spots, the plastic doesn’t curl up easily and requires dangerous amounts of the ironing and scrubbing to remove the stuff. The plus side is that underneath the design, the stabilizer remains on-the-job but invisible, so the embroidery remains stable and keeps the fabric nap from poking through even after several washes and irons.
The Presentation: After roaming through Michael’s for a while, I found the white shirt boxes I wanted. Then I found some pretty place cards I could use as name tags, stickers to match, and a pretty silver mesh ribbon. Miles then wrote the names of the guests on the cards. When all assembled, the boxes looked like this.
As mentioned, most guests came in pairs, but there were several sets of 3. The boxes were big enough to fit 2 towels side-by-side or 3 towels with a bit of creative folding. Dark green paper was used to line the boxes, and when the towels were placed into the boxes, the recipient should have seen something like this when they opened it.
What I Learned: As mentioned, when I finished all the towels, they all got tossed into the washer and then dried to remove the stabilizer. When I pulled the first towel out, I nearly cried when I saw the design had all crumpled up, but that vanished with a spot of ironing. The amount of thread on the design area is rather high, so it was denser than the rest of the towel and will need to be hand-smoothed at the least after a washing to keep it flat and attractive. When I pulled out the next towel, I nearly cried again when I saw that damn low-heat stabilizer still happily in place. And when I started pulling out some towels on which the embroidery floss had bled a bit, I’m just glad there wasn’t a cliff nearby. My mom and most of the other women there the night before the wedding pitched in to help remove the plastic stabilizer, but it was slow going. I was very upset and ready to scrap the whole damn thing, since now I had a less than happy opinion of the end result, but with everyone saying “no one will notice” (“how the hell are they NOT going to notice that the dark brown floss bled all over the rest of the towel?!!”) I figured I’d put too much time in on these things and went ahead with the gifting, even though I was cringing and disappointed. I can only hope that the designs that bled somewhat will wash out with future washings. On the plus side, the material softened up and came out fluffy fluffy pretty! On another negative side, I will never again do detail work on terry cloth with a high nap — the fuzzies covered up much of the scroll design behind the letter and obscurred the pretty edges on the round design. The higher the pile, the simpler the design needs to be.
As usual, I learned lots on this project by failing a lot. While I appreciate the lessons learned, I’m yet again disappointed in myself for using good projects to learn on. I SHOULD have done a couple towels – 1 of each design, 1 of each topping – and then washed them repeatedly. I’ll still be doing that, just to see what happens, but I SHOULD have done that BEFORE I did 35 of them and found out all the various “oopsies!”. *le sigh*
