HOODIE TOWEL ONE: GETTING STARTED

THE HOODIE TOWEL CRAZE




Three common types of hoodie towel:
Hooded Cape, Hooded Robe, and Hooded Poncho

There's been a huge craze for children's hoodie towels lately.  There are hoodie capes for infants and toddlers, hoodie bathrobes, and hoodie ponchos--the latter is usually a rectangular towel that has a hole in the middle for your head.  A lot of these towels are super cute, with faces and even teeth on the hoods, and colorful embellishments that turn the towels into animal costumes.

Now, I love how simple it is to turn a functional item like a towel into a shark or a tiger.  Add some eyes and ears and some spikey terry cloth teeth, maybe some paws!  I think this would be a lot of fun.

If you would like to try a couple fun, simple projects of your own, it looks like you basically only need some cheap towels, scissors, some pins, a ruler, and a sewing machine.  I looked at a lot of online tutorials when developing my own towel hoodie (just Google "hoodie towel" for lots of tutorials and images), and it looks like most of the basics are the same.  For a kid's cape, all you have to do is turn half of a hand towel into a hood, sew it onto the full-size towel, and embellish!

These two websites were my favorites: This link shows you links to 25 neat do-it-yourself beach accessories that you can make out of towels.  This link shows how a mom used the elements of a favorite sweatshirt to create a unique towel poncho design.

In this particular instance, I was asked to create a hoodie towel for a grown up.  A friend of mine surfs a lot, and he does not always have access to a place where he can change back into his clothes.  He has a few friends who wear hoodie towels that they got in Japan, and he wanted something similar.  He described the hoodie towel to me as a wide tubular robe with a hood, that was warm on a cold day and was roomy enough to change inside of.

In the following blog series, I will show you how I worked, step by step, to create my first hoodie towel robe.


Brainstorming options for combining color panels

GETTING STARTED
As I said, I started out by looking at lots of DIY tutorials and images online.  Most of the images were of cute animal capes and striped ponchos that were designed for children, and only required a towel and a hand towel.

My hoodie needed to fit an adult man, so I was going to need a lot more fabric.  I will start out by saying that I bought my terry cloth at a fabric store.  In retrospect, I think that I might have saved more money and found more fun designs if I had bought cheap towels.  See what is available near you and decide what works best for you.

The fabric store I went to only had terry cloth in solid colors, so I ended up buying 2 yards of light green fabric and 2 yards of brown.  The green and brown were fun, natural colors that would show fewer stains than the lighter color options, and having two colors would make a giant robe look more interesting.

My materials:

Sewing Machine, Pre-Washed Terry Cloth,
Matching/Complimentary Thread Options, Pins, Scissors,
Ruler & Measuring Tape

I made sure to pre-wash and dry the terry cloth so I wouldn't get uneven shrinkage in future.  Be forewarned: the edges of the fabric shed a lot!  My work table had a steadily-growing collection of terry-cloth-nubbins.

SEWING
With this project, I sewed all seams with straight-stitch first, with a 1/2" seam allowance.

When I was certain that my piecing and fit were correct, I went back over those seams with a zig-zag stitch, with a 1/4" seam allowance (closer to the edge of the fabric).  This is a much more secure stitch.

This method was recommended in a lot of the tutorials I looked at, which recommended a hand towel and a bath towel or beach towel as base materials.  And I would say that these stitches do in general produce a lovely, sturdy, functional item of clothing.   However, since I was not using finished towels for my project, I had a lot of rough edges and cut threads along the inside seams of my robe.  This was especially noticeable on the inside of the hood, which is visible whenever the hood is not being worn.   For a more professional look, if I were to do this project again, I would have given myself a larger seam allowance, at minimum in the hood and neck (maybe 3/4"?).  I would have then folded all edges under and stitched them down, for a cleaner, more presentable seam.

Next week: Creating the hood and body of the robe