Three Nuts in a Shell: Americana tea towels

When I was hunting down a graphic for my Pinterest challenge, the one I settled on actually made me remember another project I had seen (and pinned), ironically also from YHL.

Source: younghouselove.com via Amber on Pinterest

I loved this pop of red from the bike. The image was so cute and fun, and my first thought was it would be so easy to make something like that! I'm a huge fan of iron-on transfer paper for just about any project involving prints and fabrics (I guess I'm old school since I haven't jumped on the Cricut or Silhouette bandwagon). I recently picked up some super cute tea towels from IKEA (for all of 79¢) at the beginning of the month and I thought, along with the red stripe on the towel, some blue images would add that sweet little Americana kick I seem to be on (I blame the month of July; how can you not be patriotic?).

My bike image came from The Graphics Fairy (it's the same image I used on my galvanized tin, just minus the advertising words), and the other two images I found on Google. I really wanted to stick to the whole vintage transportation theme, and I wanted the pictures to look hand drawn or sketched.

I changed to tint to blue (I use PowerPoint to edit all my images--I'm way old school) so they all looked alike. I pressed the towels in a folded position so I knew exactly where to place my images. The iron-on paper says not to use an ironing board, but a hard surface covered with a pillow case (??). This created way more trouble than it was worth, so I just laid a towel over our ironing board and it seemed to work just fine. I really don't understand how iron-on paper isn't supposed to be used on an ironing board. But whatever.

Thanks to the nubby texture of the tea towels, the graphic take one an almost ghostly transparent effect. I really like the way they turned out, even though they're not as crisp and bold as my inspiration. They look a little more time-worn which actually pleases me more than I expected.