Personalized Hand Towel for a Gift with Cricut Explore

Hi friends! It’s that time of the year- gift giving season! I was brainstorming personalized gifts and I thought a hand towel for a kitchen would be so fun. It’s practical, but can also be sentimental or decorative. The towels themselves are very affordable and then the options for customization are endless! Here’s how to make a personalized hand towel for a gift!

Thank you to Cricut for sponsoring this post

how to make a personalized hand towel

SUPPLIES

• Cricut Air Explore 2
• Everyday Iron-on in Bright Teal, Yellow, Parchment, Blush, Black, and Gray
• Easy Press Mini
• Easy Press Mat
• Portable Trimmer
• Weeder Tool
• Hand Towels
• Pattern for these tea towels

colorful graphic personalized hand towel

For this first towel, I wanted to make a really fun hand towel that has a recipe on it with lots of cute corresponding images. This would be cute with a neighbor gift- create a towel with the gift and then make the recipe and give them both together. I choose to use a recipe I love, but it could also be a family recipe- anything goes!

step 1

Start by opening up Cricut Design Space and get to designing! Here’s some tips- use a cute font for the name (I used Babette) and add a border or flourish to make it stand out.

Type out each step and then look for corresponding images (I just used ones in Design Space) that will illustrate the recipe. For example a stove, mixer, eggs, rolling pin, etc.

Put a pretty border at the bottom to finish the design off. 

Change the color of each element so it’s the actual color of vinyl you want it to be. That way you can visualize it better and it’ll cut all the pieces of one vinyl together. 

My pattern is available on Cricut here if you want to use this design and make one for you too!

step 2

Next, begin the process of cutting out the vinyl. The way the Cricut works is that it cuts out one color of vinyl at a time. So the pink on the mixer will be cut with the pink border and oven mitt. 

What I like to do is have two mats and pre-cut the vinyl I need. I start the first mat to begin cutting in the Cricut, prep the second mat, and keep going through the colors. I use this trimmer to pre-cut the vinyl to be the exact size I need to prevent waste. You can see in the below image I used to quickly cut the vinyl. It was a mess and meant I wasted more. 

Since I will be ironing on the vinyl, I make sure to turn on the mirror button in Cricut design space. I also put the material face down (so the shiny side is down) on the mat. On my Explore Air 2, I select the material “iron-on” so it’s cut at the right depth. These are all KEY steps!

step 3

And now, the material is cut. What will come out is a piece of vinyl cut with the design and excess vinyl outside it. Use the weeding tool to pull out the excess vinyl. The very first time I used my Cricut, I didn’t realized I needed to do this and ironed on a square of vinyl instead of the cute word I wanted. Lol! So make sure to weed first!

step 4

Finally, it’s time to iron on the materials. I like to work from the top of the towel down. First, set the mini press to medium heat. Next, iron the hand towel where the first piece will go to heat up the material for 5 seconds. Then, place the weeded out vinyl iron-on material onto the hand towel. Note, if you’re using a different Easy Press, you can find the heat guide here.

Put another hand towel over it and with light pressure and constant movement, iron over the vinyl. Flip and press the back for 15 seconds. When it has cooled down so it is warm, pull off the plastic backing. Repeat for each color and piece of vinyl.

I found some colors were trickier to iron on than others. In particular, anything with gray didn’t want to stick for some reason. But following the steps above and doing small sections at a time helped the iron-on material adhere.

Another tip I wanted to pass on is- don’t iron directly onto the towel without placing something else (like another towel) on top of it. A few times, I ironed-on a word and then was working next to it on the next piece. I’d hold the iron too long on the words I’d just completed and they’d curl up and melt off. That never happened with the hand towel over the words though. 

after

Here’s how the colorful graphic personalized hand towel turned out- isn’t it so cute?! I love the scalloped detail and think it’s so cheerful and fun!

I love that the graphic of the stove on the hand towel looks exactly like my stove!

I thought it’d be fun to show one idea of how this would make a great gift. I’d totally theme the gift (since that’s what I like to do) and give a cute apron, oven mitt, maybe a fancy baking mix and spatula. You can click the photos below to shop.

hand writing personalized hand towel

For the second hand towel, this is more of a sentimental option. If you have a recipe written by someone in your family, this would be a great way to have it memorialized and get to see it everyday. This would be a great gift to a family member too!

step 1

For my recipe, I had my grandma write a recipe I love of her’s on paper. Then she took a picture of it and texted to me. Yes, I am proud of how technologically advanced she is ;). When she sent me this recipe I wanted to cry- it’s my favorite recipe she makes in her beautiful hand writing. This is a priceless gift to me!

If I was to do this again, I’d ask her to write it on white paper with black ink (so do that if you’re asking someone to write down a recipe for you). I imported the image she sent me into PicMonkey and turned it black and white and made as much contrast as possible. Save the image.

step 2

Next, import the image into Cricut’s Design Space. Click “upload”, click “select image”, and then find the image of the hand written recipe on the computer. Under “select image type”, I choose “complex”. Next, I clicked with the mouse every part of the image I didn’t want printed. For me, that was the background, and all the the little pieces inside the o’s, y’s, e’s, and a’s.

Lastly, make sure to import the image in as a cut file. This will tell the Cricut you want it to cut the words into pieces of vinyl. The other option is for it to be printed out- 99% of the time you won’t want that. 

step 3

And now, put the image inside a new project on Design Space and resize it to be the size you want (mine is 9″x12″)When you’re happy with how it looks, begin the cutting process and hit the “make it” button. Make sure to turn the mirror on in the settings and to put the shiny side down of the iron-on material onto the mat.

Have the machine start cutting by loading the material (hit the arrow button so the mat is placed in the correct place on the machine). When it’s loaded, hit the “c” and that’ll begin the cutting process.

Note- for hand written fonts it takes awhile for the machine to cut it. The recipe took probably 30 minutes. Make SURE to plug your laptop in so it doesn’t die half way through. That happened to me and it was frustrating. Pretty much, I want you to not make any the mistakes I did!

step 4

These are mostly the same steps as above-

Finally, it’s time to iron on the materials. I like to work from the top of the towel down. First, set the mini press to medium heat. Next, iron the hand towel where the first piece will go to heat up the material for 5 seconds. Then, place the weeded out vinyl iron-on material onto the hand towel. Note, if you’re using a different Easy Press, you can find the heat guide here.

Put another hand towel over it and with light pressure and constant movement, iron over the vinyl. Flip and press the back for 15 seconds. When it has cooled down so it is warm, pull off the plastic backing. Since the recipe was on one piece of vinyl, I found it helpful to iron a few lines of the recipe on at once, pull the backing off, and cut it. Then I’d work on the next lines.

I found some colors were trickier to iron on than others. In particular, anything with gray didn’t want to stick for some reason. But following the steps above and doing small sections at a time helped the iron-on material adhere.

Another tip I wanted to pass on is- don’t iron directly onto the towel without placing something else (like another towel) on top of it. A few times, I ironed-on a word and then was working next to it on the next piece. I’d hold the iron too long on the words I’d just completed and they’d curl up and melt off. That never happened with the hand towel over the words though. 

after

Here the towel is all finished up! I think it looks beautiful! It reminds me of my grandma and how she smells like lavender and how much I can’t wait to see her again. I miss her! 

What do you think? If this a project you’d like to try? I love the idea of taking someone’s handwriting and turning it into decor.

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