Hanging Dish Towel

Most houses I have been in have had some kind of dish towel draped across the handle of the stove. How about your house? Well, in the houses I grew up in, we had these.

My grandma has them, my mom has them, my aunts have them, and it was the first gift my aunt gave me when I moved out (hers is pictured on the left in the picture above).

I love these towels. They are great for hanging anywhere and everywhere. I like to have at least two available in the kitchen at one time. When I first moved out, I had just the one. And that never seemed to be enough, especially when I had to take it off to be washed. I didn’t have anything to replace it if I wasn’t doing laundry right away!

So, I went to my handy-dandy little friend, Google. Nothing. Nothing even remotely close to the adorable towels my aunt made for everyone. I went to my back-up: Pinterest. Nothing. There were hanging dish towels, but they weren’t the same. Finally, I called up my aunt. “I need your pattern.”

I should have known her answer before I even asked it. “Well, I don’t really have a pattern… I didn’t like the ones I found, so I mashed a few different ones together, made alterations, and have been doing those ever since. I don’t even think about it anymore. I just make them.” She is family. I do the same thing. You get to a point where you just know the pattern and don’t look at it anymore, but if you get asked, you can’t think of it at all.

Two months later, she sent me my birthday gift, a second towel… and a handwritten pattern. Since then, I have made a couple alterations to the pattern of my own. Many of my family members actually got one or two of these this last Christmas.