How to recycle old towels into a beach blanket

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By chicaandjo
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Ready for the sand!

Use your old towels (or pretty new ones) to make a beach blanket your entire family can actually lounge on!

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Step 1

Lay out your pattern on the floor of how you want the towels to look in the end. The striped towels made it easy to line up and pin the towels together. We overlapped the towels by about an inch, putting the middle towel on top of the two outer towels each time.
Step 2

Lining up towels

Pin two towels together and sew a straight line down the one side of the overlapped fabric and then back on the other side. Since the rolled edges of the towels where they joined were so thick, we didn’t use the machine to sew this small part, we hand stitched them.
Step 3

After sewing the three top towels together and the three bottom towels together, we sewed the two pieces together. The hardest part was shoving all of that material through the right side of the machine! That was it, project finished.

Tips & Warnings

If you want to put a back on the beach blanket, buy an inexpensive fabric shower curtain liner. We looked at backing my blanket with some outdoor fabric but the cost was way too much!
Cut up your towels to make a unique pattern. We didn’t do this because I wanted to do the sewing and show how even a novice could do this project. I could see how using blocks of the material would make a neat design though. Maybe after I master sewing a bit more, I will try it out.