Stamped Tea Towels (Made Using Food!)

Fruit is one of my absolute favorite things about summer.

I mean, there are lots of things that I love…time with the kids while they are on break, beach vacations, barbecuing, and flip flops. I live in my flip flops!

But fresh fruit really does rank pretty high on the list.

My crush on fruit inspired me to create these cute stamped tea towels over the weekend. They took just about zero time, a ridiculous amount of non-effort and cost next to nothing. Read on to see just how easy they were to create.

I actually had these tea towels on hand that I had picked up for a project ages ago that I never completed. I found them at Walmart and they were a couple of bucks each. I grabbed them, rounded up some craft paint and fabric paint medium (since I knew I would want to wash these), a paintbrush, lemon and a potato.

That almost sounds like the beginning of a joke…a paintbrush, lemon and potato walk into a craft room…

No? Just me? Yeah, I get that.

I started with my lemon towel. To be honest, it is not my favorite of the two. Some of the lemon stamps came out perfectly, but some just ended up looking like a circle with no character from the lemon itself showing through. I think that I would really want to work on stamping paper for a while to really figure this one out before I did it again. It’s cute, but not what I was envisioning.

I simply sliced a lemon in half, blotted it quite a bit on a dry towel to try to get some of the juices out and using a paintbrush, applied a thin coat of paint to the cut end. I dabbed it a time or two on a piece of paper towel and then placed it on the tea towel.

The purple stamp shown above was my favorite. You can see the yellow one on the right side doesn’t resemble a lemon as much. 🙁 Don’t get me wrong, it’s still cute and I’m most definitely going to use it and enjoy it.

Aah, and then come my watermelons. I am obsessed with these! Grab that potato and slice it into quarters (I actually used three different potatoes to cut them and pick out different sizes/shapes). Dip them directly into the paint and dab a time or two on a paper towel. Apply to the tea towel.

The potatoes were a bit more of a challenge to hold on to, so I just dug my fingernails right into the sides and held on tightly.

After you’ve stamped the fruit, using green paint, drag your paintbrush around the curve to create your rind. Then go back in with the end of your paintbrush and add some black dots for seeds. Easy peasy.