Painted Chevron Tea Towel

I wanted a fun geometric print in my kitchen that wasn't too in your face, so I decided to paint my own tea towel with a spunky chevron pattern and hang it over my oven handle.

I know the location of hanging kitchen linens is a hot topic for some (I know me and my mom have had heated discussions over it), but I figured hanging a towel here would contrast nicely against the black of the appliances.

So I picked up my supplies:

The tea towels were on clearance at Michaels (a pack of 3 for $3.99), and I already had the Martha Stewart Crafts Multi-Surface Metallic Acrylic Craft Paint in Rose Gold, the Scotch Blue painter's tape, and the foam brush in my craft room stash.

So this little project cost me four dollars, total, for supplies. Or $1.33 per tea towel.

Now, the instructions on the tea towel package clearly state "Wash prior to crafting use," but I was only doing one towel for now, had about two hours to do it, and have all the best intentions of keeping this towel clean solely for display and prettyness purposes (say it with me now: YEAH RIGHT). So no pre-washing happened here.  This time.

As you can see, ironing didn't happen, either.

I started taping, decided I only wanted two rows of chevrons, and then cleaned up my tape, especially at the corners of the zig-zags. Make sure to really press down the edges of your tape to lock it down and keep the bleeding at a minimum.

Then I took my foam brush and add two light coats of paint, making sure to remove the tape while the paint was still wet for a nice clean line.

I don't have a photo of the towel with tape AND paint, but here it is once I removed the paint.

Clean line? What clean line? Oh well, me likey.

Oh yeah, and put something under your towel while you're painting. Because it will bleed through to your pretty little white Threshold pedestal table from Target that you spent weeks stalking on their website because they were out of stock for FOREVER and you thought you'd cry the day you saw it was back in stock.

Or maybe that's just me?

Anyway, I digress.

I am kind of thinking that the two lines of chevron might remind me too much of Charlie Brown, but at least I still have two more towels to play with! I kind of wish I had picked up more than one package of these. They would make such sweet Christmas or housewarming gifts. And the possibilities are endless...polka dots, stencils, freehand painting or drawing...you can personalize these any way you'd like!

How would you decorate a tea towel?