Hooded Towel

Oh, baby! When you get to be a certain age (really late 20s...okay, okay mid-30s), you find yourself invited to a lot of baby showers. Pretty close to half the people I know either just had a baby or are expecting one soon. I suppose I should have seen this coming when I was attending a wedding every weekend a few years ago, but here we are. Sure, I could hit the baby section and stock up on items, but I've always been an over achiever!

In a previous post I showed hand-knit baby booties, but I am finding that those are really only good for brand new infants. If baby is a little older, he/she needs something a little different. Enter the hooded towel.

My mother used to make these for baby showers when she was in her really late 20s and all her friends and family were having babies. Her design was a little different, but I like to put my own spin on things. This one is for a dear childhood friend who just had her first baby. I use a full size bath towel so she can use past babyhood. The hood part I make from a hand towel, and the petals are cut from a hand towel as well. It is modeled here by my darling daughter who is 9, so you can see how big it is. DD still uses her own hooded towel to this day!

Since the hood only uses part of the hand towel, I used the rest to make a little wash mitt. The stripes are knit jersey cut from an old T-shirt and tacked down with a zig zag stitch and are only on the back. The wings are microfleece.

I also made a similar towel for a baby boy from a brown towel and added little bear ears to the hood. I made the mitt look like a bear claw, which turned out so cute! Unfortunately, I was still stitching it together about 5 minutes before the shower so I didn't get a picture of it.

You would think that with all these babies coming I would learn my lesson and just have some towels done and boxed up, but I work better under pressure! Besides, who knows what will inspire me next!