hey it's vanessa the crafty gemini and in this video tutorial i'm going to teach you a quick and easy way to add a patchwork accent band to a store-bought hand towel now let's be real we don't always have time to make all of our last minute gifts completely from scratch so here's a great scrap busting weight to add a handmade touch to a store-bought hand towel now if you're new to my channel and you like what you see give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe that's super important if you want to make sure that you don't miss out on any of my future videos now let's go over the supplies you're gonna need so we can jump right into making our project you'll need a store-bought towel and the one i'm using measures 16 inches by 28 then at least five different fabrics and five inch squares works great for this we have two and a half inch lightweight fusible gridded interfacing some wonder tape and then some basic supplies like things to mark measure cut your fabrics with a working sewing machine and an iron and ironing board the first step is to cut up your five five inch squares so that we get two and a half inch cut squares that will be for the accent band on our hand towel so i like to just line these up you can cut them one at a time but i like to save time if they're all cut precisely from the same pack they shouldn't give you too much problem and it's okay if it's a little bit off but i'm going to slice a couple of these so that it's two and a half by two and a half one thing i like to do with these pre-cut squares is to first of all imagine make sure that it's actually five inches by five inches and these look pretty good sometimes they're way off so double check that before you start cutting i'm going to slice this here at two and a half and then i'll turn this and slice the other way at two and a half so all of these will be able to use repeat this here and continue to do that to the remaining squares once your squares are cut set them aside and grab a chunk of your gridded interfacing this is fusible and we carry this product in our shop and it's my favorite because you can see how sheer and lightweight it really is it gives you the perfect patchwork perfect intersections everywhere that the squares match up but there's no added weight to the actual patchwork panel so you can use this for a variety of different uses now before we cut into our grid for the piece that we'll need it's important to note that i designed this to fit a hand towel that's 16 inches across these hand towels are these waffle towels that i purchased online and i'll include a link on where you can find them but they measure 16 inches across by 28. if you're working with a hand towel that has different dimensions you'll have to do the math and figure out what you need to create a panel long enough to fit the accent portion of that towel for this one i know that you're gonna need 16 squares total so you'll need a row that's two squares by eight across so i'm looking at my dashed lines here and i'm gonna go ahead and cut that out and the reason i'm cutting my panel out ahead of time is because it's fusible and i don't want to have excess sticking out that when i go to fuse my squares on this stuff is going to get stuck to my iron and burn off so here's the strip of the gridded interfacing so grab your iron an ironing board so you're going to line this up here with the adhesive or scratchy side face up and then i want you to grab your squares and start to create the design of your accent bag any way that you wish once you like the finished design of your accent band grab your iron and the important thing here when you're fusing this is to just stamp it down don't swipe it because then you run the risk of moving these squares out of place and they should be within that two and a half inch square of the marked grid on the interfacing now we'll head over to the sewing machine we're to fold this along that center seam line and sew all the way down across all these little squares using a quarter of an inch seam allowance once that's pressed you can see that along the center line here they've all been sewn together now we need to go back and stitch them together this way across every single one of these seams but to do that remember how when we folded this in half it just kind of lied flat on us before it was sewn well now when you go to do it like this you need to ease up on the bulk that's created right here at the seam allowance before you go back and sew because sometimes it tries to buckle on you and it won't let you get the perfect intersection that you want from row to row so i'm going to come in here flip this over and snip right at that join to loosen this up and repeat that across the entire way making sure you don't cut through your stitches though just in the seam allowance now we'll go back to the sewing machine and we're going to sew each one across flip it sew down press it then we'll do the same thing here and i will just sew them all and then head back to the iron to then press them all nice and flat so each one all the way across the entire panel and you can see that i get perfect intersections every single time it's a great scrap buster and it really helps to have this gridded interfacing for these type of projects now because these edges are all raw we want to turn them under to conceal them before we go back and top stitch them to our towel to create the accent band so you're going to flip this pretty side face down and then i want you to turn under the raw edges on all four sides i do the long ones at about a quarter of an inch and you can press it with your iron if you have some type of a basting glue that will be helpful also to help keep the fabric flipped over especially since it's bulky right at the intersections with the fabrics and the interfacing but you can see that it's going to want to flip back on you so that can be tricky so what i like to do is use my wonder tape and we carry this in our online shop as well because it is exactly a quarter of an inch wide so instead i come in and i place it tacky side down right on the edge so that i know it's only going to take up exactly the quarter inch space that i need to turn under on the edge so run it right along your edges scratch it once with my nail and then peel back on that paper to expose the sticky side here and all you got to do is flip it onto itself you don't even have to press it with an iron do you see how that's just staying this is like the easiest way to get an even fold back sometimes we try to turn under a small amount of fabric like a quarter of an inch like this and some parts is a quarter of an inch some is 3 8 and then you end up with this kind of jagged little line when you get to top stitching whereas if you use the wonder tape like this you can see you get a nice crisp and even folded edge and it's super fast too so that side's done we'll flip it over and i'll do the same thing to the other long side now the two short sides also need to be finished but for these because this tends to measure almost exactly what i need it to depending on how wide your seam allowance was you may want to double check right here first with the towel that you're planning to stitch this to so put your towel out lay the contrast piece on it and see how much overage you have if any and determine how much under you need to turn this under so that you're not short and end up with something like this that doesn't reach all the way to the end of your towel does that make sense so i see that i have enough and i still have enough on either end to turn my short edges under a quarter of an inch so i'll do exactly that with the same wonder tape technique and there it is our accent panel is done all the edges turned under so now it can be beautifully top stitched right onto our towel now we'll find the bottom edge of the towel that we want to stitch this to and then it's up to you to measure how high you want yours to be from the bottom up i like to measure mine just about two and a half inches so you can mark this or you can just kind of measure from the bottom up and then place some pins on the sides i like to grab my long strip ruler because it reaches the entire distance place the two and a half inch mark right on the bottom hem of my towel here and then i know that i can scoot this down right where i want it to be and then place some pins on the sides now let's head over to the sewing machine and we're going to top stitch all the way around all four sides of the accent strip and there it is just give it a quick press and there's a cute patchwork accent band that you can add to any store-bought towel and there you have it a super quick and easy beginner friendly and scrap busting way to add that little handmade touch to store-bought towels now remember that i always include links for you on where you can purchase the materials and items that i'm using in every specific project including these hand towels i bought them in bulk which is a great way to check off a ton of people off your list pick some fabrics from your stash that you think the recipient will enjoy and in no time you're gonna have some handmade projects and gifts completed now i hope you enjoyed this video tutorial if you did give this video a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss out on any of my future videos this was day six of my 12 days of last minute diy gifts and that means that tomorrow i'll be back with day 7 which includes another free step-by-step video tutorial thanks again for watching this video and i will see you in the next one bye