The back story
We began our project to help out with Colchester In
Bloom. As the weather this year has not been great for growing enough flowers,
we made our own artificial ones out of yellow plastic bags and tea towels with
flower patterns on, to help with our window box displays.
When we had made enough Colchester In Bloom tea
towels, we decided to expand on the project as we had a taste for the process.
Other themes for Tea Towels have included The Cutty
Sark (as Jane wanted to sell at a stall in Greenwich market), elephants, fish
squares, mermaids, The Wanted (the band), various abstracts and a specialty tea
towel for Franklins who donated us a sewing machine (commissions welcome). Coming
soon will be themes on wildlife and space.
The Process
The T towels are made from 100% cotton, or a linen and
rayon mix bought from Franklins and Fabric8. The designs are drawn with Dylon
fabric pens and painted with fabric paint. These colours are fixed by ironing,
then the edges pinned and sewn using our lovely sewing machine, generously
donated by Franklins on St Botolphs Street Colchester, Essex CO2 7DU
(selection of some of the T Towels produced)
Sale
Each T towel is produced either by a trainee with a
vision or a group of trainees working on different elements of a pattern and we
are accepting offers of between £3 and £20 for each.
And if you need any more encouragement as to how
necessary a good towel is, here’s Douglas Adams with his thoughts in the
Hitchhikers Guide To The galaxy;
"A towel, it says, is about the
most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has
great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound
across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant
marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can
sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of
Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it
for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious
fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a
mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see
you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in
emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it
still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has
immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch
hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will
automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face
flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat
spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then
happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch
hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is
that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum
it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his
towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
