Stitching the Sweetest Reindeer: A Guide to Embroidered Dishtowel Kits
Some holiday projects take over the whole sewing room. This one fits in a hoop. The Oh! What Fun Dishtowel Pattern and Floss Kit pairs a sweet reindeer design with a ready-made towel, so your work is all in the enjoyable part — transferring the motif, stitching it in colorful floss, and finishing it off with a cheerful trim. If you have never tried an embroidery kit before, this is a friendly place to learn how they work and what makes a good one worth buying.
What This Kit Makes
The finished project is an embroidered dishtowel featuring what the maker calls the sweetest reindeer — a single, characterful holiday motif stitched directly onto the towel that comes in the kit. Because the base is a finished Dunroven towel rather than a quilt top, there is no piecing, batting, backing, or binding to think about. The towel itself sets the finished size, and once the stitching and trim are done, the project is complete and ready to hang. The style is classic kitchen Christmas: a hand-stitched design on a working towel, equally at home draped over an oven handle as a decoration or pressed into service drying dishes at a holiday gathering.
The kit is also pitched as a great fit for a "Block of the Month" style program, and that makes sense. A single towel is a satisfying, self-contained project — the embroidery equivalent of one block — so a group or guild can stitch the same design together, compare floss choices and stitch quality, and everyone finishes with something useful.
What's Included
The kit bundles the essentials so you are not chasing supplies: a full-size pattern, the Dunroven towel, DMC floss, and ric-rac. The full-size pattern matters more than it might sound — there is no enlarging on a copier or scaling a printout and hoping the proportions survive. What you see is the size you stitch. DMC floss is the workhorse of hand embroidery, with a deep color range and a stranded construction that lets you choose how many strands to stitch with. The ric-rac adds a playful, wavy trim that suits the reindeer's lighthearted character.
What you will supply yourself is the usual embroidery toolkit: an embroidery needle, small sharp scissors, a hoop if you like stitching under tension, and your preferred method for transferring the design onto the towel.
Skill Level and Time
This is an approachable project for a confident beginner and a relaxing one for experienced stitchers. The techniques are the foundations of hand embroidery — transferring a design and working it in floss — rather than advanced specialty stitches, and the single motif keeps the scope small. As for time, plan on a few relaxed stitching sessions rather than a marathon: an evening to transfer the design and get started, then unhurried sittings to fill in the reindeer and attach the trim. Hand embroidery rewards patience, and a towel-sized design is easy to pick up and put down between other holiday tasks.
Tips for Success
Transfer carefully. Test your transfer method on a corner of the towel first, use a light source or window to trace accurately, and make sure your lines are complete before the hoop goes on — faint, broken lines are frustrating to stitch from.
Mind your tension. Towel fabric is softer and more flexible than quilting cotton, so avoid pulling stitches tight; puckered fabric around a motif is almost always tension, not talent. A hoop helps keep the surface stable, and separating your floss strands before stitching gives smoother, more even coverage.
Keep the back tidy. Short tails, secured ends, and no long traveling threads across the back will make the towel nicer to use and to wash — this is a kitchen textile, after all, not a framed piece, so think about how it will live after the last stitch.
Finally, let the ric-rac do its job. That wavy trim is the frame for your stitching: press the towel first, place the trim evenly, and sew it down carefully so the finished towel looks as polished as it feels festive.
Shop the Oh! What Fun Dishtowel Pattern and Floss Kit at Linda's Electric Quilters.
