Trekkie Mom: Petal Towel Wrap

I don't know about any of you, but those hooded towels that are sold for infants are not very useful. Sure, they may be useful for a month or 2, but your baby quickly grows too large for it to cover her effectively. As a mother of 3, I only used these towels on my first when the novelty was still new, and I still cared about cute over functionality.

Don't get me wrong. I still love cute!

But if it's a choice of cute or functional, I definitely choose functional. This is one reason why I make so many things rather than buy them, because I can make them to fit my specifications exactly.

So, when my little girl (#3) came home, I was splitting the extra large hooded towel (basically a regular towel with a hood sewn in the middle length-wise) between my 3-year-old and the baby. I am not against sharing, but when the baby spit up or peed or worse on the towel, I didn't have a good replacement for my son.

Mission
Attack the linen closet.
Find good-ish, lonely, mismatched towels to cannibalize.

Loot Found
Old college towel and matching hand towel.

Loot I already knew I had.
Yellow terry given to me by my good friend Margaret!

Using our existing hooded towel as a guide, I cut the hand towel down to 21" long. From that piece, I cut 3" piece length-wise.

DON'T DO TRY THIS AT HOME
Then, I cut a length of yellow terry 20"x6" and sketched some petals along the fabric to sew.

Now, I haven't tried something like this before, so of course I made mistakes, and my petals looked like this when I tried to turn them inside out.

Doesn't look too good, right?

So, I ended up cutting up each petal individually, zigzagging the edges, then turning them inside-out and top stitching. After completing 6 petals, I placed a line of completed petals side by side, leaving a half an inch (approximately) on each side of the 3" band and sewed a quarter inch seam to attach them.

I could have left it alone, but I wasn't satisfied, so I created 5 more petals to stagger between the other petals to give it more of a real flower look, and stitched another quarter inch seam to attach them to the same piece. I broke a needle doing this, but it was totally worth it!

Next, I lined up the 2 edges of the towel and sewed an approximate quarter inch seam and zigzagged the edges.

It is all starting to come together.

Since I liked the look of the 3" side of my hood the best, I decided to leave those on the outside. Not bothering with the iron, I finger pressed the seam and folded down an inch or so on the finished edge of the 3 inch piece.

Finally, I top stitched each edge and once down the middle.

To finish of the hood, I used my store-bought hooded towel that I love as a guide.

This led me to cut off about 2.5 inches length-wise.

On the wrong side, I zigzag stitched the back of the hood.

The final step was to attach the hood to the main towel. I folded the large towel in half width-wise and lined up the zigzag stitch at the back of the hood with the fold of the large towel, pinned, sewed a half inch seam, and zigzagged.

All done.

Now, compare that to one of those puny corner hooded infant towels.