Pin-Spired and Personalized Baby Gifts

One of my good friends recently gave birth to adorable twins, a boy and a girl.  I debated about what to give as a baby gift and did some searching on Pinterest for ideas, and this hooded bath towel tutorial from Prudent Baby made up my mind for me.  The tutorial was easy to follow and the towels were quick to make.  They turned out even cuter than I'd anticipated:

I decided to personalize the towels and added each baby's first initial to the back of the towel.  I won't take the time to give you a tutorial for the towels themselves, since the Prudent Baby tutorial is excellent, but I'll quickly explain how I made the initial.

Start out by ironing some fusible interfacing to the back of your fabric; I used the same fabric that I used for the decorative band on the hood.  I used a medium-weight interfacing.  You want something heavy enough to give the fabric some stability, but not something so heavy that it makes the letter super stiff.  Next, find a font that you like and enlarge the letter to the size you want.  I did this in Word and made the letter as large as it could get while still fitting on one page.  To save ink, I printed it as an outline, rather than a solid letter.  Pin your letter to your stabilized fabric and cut it out, then pin it to your towel and sew around the entire perimeter of the letter.  You can use a zig-zag stitch if you want, but I just straight-stitched  as close to the edge as I dared, then washed the towels and trimmed any ragged strings.

I had a lot of fun making these towels (other than when I broke a sewing machine needle and then put the replacement needle in backwards...), and I hope babies L and V love using them!