Garden Vegetables Tea Towel Sewing Tutorial

Bring some springtime into your kitchen with this garden vegetables tea towel! Use my tutorial and free applique templates to create a tea towel that features carrots, turnips, and beets.

My mother is an avid gardener with a large plot in a community garden. So when spring comes around, there’s one thing on her mind. Planting the veggies! And it won’t be long before she’s sharing the vegetables picked from her garden.

This kitchen towel celebrates the bounty of a garden with colorful appliques of carrots, turnips, and beets. I’ve got a tutorial and free pattern for you below.

You can make the towel from a heavier weight cotton fabric. I like to use the home décor weight cotton canvas fabric from JOANN. (This fabric is heavier than a quilting weight cotton but NOT as thick as the duck cloth.) You could also just purchase a plain tea towel and skip straight to making the applique vegetable designs.

You can use any quilting weight cotton for the appliques, but I chose to use batiks. The variations in colors and textures were perfect for veggie shapes. The pieces are all pretty small so you may have some fabrics in your scrap bin already.

I used a mix of scraps and some ¼ yard cuts from the batik aisle at the fabric store. I got lucky that some of them had geometric designs that reminded me of a carrot. And the swirly designs on the green were perfect for the lacy leaves that top a carrot.

The free pattern includes a placement template in case you want to make a towel that looks like mine. But of course you can arrange your spring veggies any way you like on your own tea towel!

Finished dimensions are 20.5” x 28.5”.

Supplies

22” x 30” home décor weight cotton fabric (1 yard will be enough to make 2 towels.)

Quilting weight cotton scraps:

Green – leaves (carrot/turnip/beet tops)
Orange, white, and dark purple – carrots
Red – turnip
Magenta – beet

Fusible webbing

Free pattern – Garden Veggie Tea Towel

Sew the Tea Towel

Press in a 3/8” double fold hem around all sides of your fabric. Miter the corners for a finished look. If you don’t know how to miter corners on a double fold hem, use my tutorial here.

Sew around all four sides close to the folded edge to secure your hem.

That’s all it takes to sew a basic tea towel! Now to add the applique to make it pretty.

Applique Prep

You can use the templates to create any kind of arrangement of veggies you like your for your spring tea towel. But if you want to make one that looks just like the one I made, you can use the placement guide included in the pattern.

Trace the shapes on the pattern on to your fusible webbing. The shapes are already reversed for you. To make the design like mine, you’ll use all of the shapes, PLUS an extra Carrot 1 and Carrot 1 Top.

With so many shapes and so many colors of fabric, it can get confusing which shape needs to be cut from which fabric. I like to add a little notation to each shape that says which color it should be cut from.

Follow manufacturer’s instructions to fuse the shapes to the back of your fabric, and then cut the shapes out.

Remove the paper backing from the shapes.

Applique the Design

Use the placement guide to place the Carrot 1 and Carrot 1 Top pieces. (In the placement guide, these are the dark purple and the light orange carrots.) Follow manufacturer’s instructions to fuse in place.

You’ll notice that the Carrot 1 Top piece on the left carrot (the purple carrot) is slightly askew. That’s on purpose to keep the two carrots from looking too identical.

Top stitch around the edges to secure.

There are some pretty tight curves, especially in the top (leaf) pieces. Set your machine on a shorter stitch in order to have more control. Hand crank the machine on the tightest curves.

Use the placement guide to place the Carrot 2, Carrot 2 Top, Carrot 3, and Carrot 3 Top pieces. Fuse in place.