DIY Super Cheap Hand Towel Tutorial (Save $$ and Stop Adding to Landfills)

I have a super simple, problem solving project for you today.

Do you kids/spouse/anyone in your house either require a brand new paper towel or hand towel every time they wash their hands? Yeah, me and everyone else around here. My kids make an especially huge mess, they even take out clean huge bath towels to dry their hands! If they have paper towels, they use like, 10 at a time and I feel like a money waster! This drives me nuts.

My solution? I went to Goodwill here in San Antonio, bought 2 hand towels (99 cents each!), cut them into 8 mini towels each and voila, problem solved! I did play around with how to finish the raw towel edges, as you can see, I tried bias binding: cute but took too much time (I am a super lazy sewer), a double row of straight stitching (boring), and then, finally, a large zig zag stitch-the winner!!

 Step By Step:

• Buy towels, take them home and wash and dry on hot. Maybe add some bleach! Dry towels.

• Cut fresh towels to the size you want. I just kept cutting them in half until they were a size I liked (I just used the lines on my cutting mat as a guide, I never actually measured anything)

•  Figure out how you want to finish raw edges. I started out using double fold bias tape, but for me, it was faster to do a zig zag stitch on the edges

• Put towels back in dryer to take away the lint that was created when cutting the towels.
  
• DONE!

Now I have 16 mini hand towels for the kids and I am never buying paper towels for the bathroom or wasting huge bath towels on hand drying again! I put the clean ones in a bathroom drawer, and put a red plastic bin I got at Goodwill for 99 cents under the counter for the dirty towels. Since I am doing laundry often, these will constantly be cleaned and replenished.

What can you make out of a repurposed towel? Linked up with Ruth over at Living Well, Spending Less! Go check her out!