Customised/Appliqued Towels

Who doesnt like personalised gifts? They seem to have become the latest gifting trend!

So.. I've been wanting to get a couple of towels customised for my daughter for the past year. A couple of friends recommended a few names who specialise in these but professionals (as usual) charge a BOMB for a small towel that wont even go around my little toddler's waist. But that I realised only after ordering and receiving the towels.
However, I should definitely say that they were really cute and my daughter was ecstatic to see beautiful princess and mermaids on them :)

And now since I don't have the option to get these delivered to me, I was thinking about trying my hand at it. Pinterest (btw .. am becoming a pinterest addict) has a zillion tutorials on how to customise towels, cushions, pillows, napkins etc.

Here are a few simple ones I tried:

Towels for my daughter and me

                    

The applique designs were taken from - http://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/free-applique-patterns.html 

I used: 

2 Plain white towel 

Heat and Bond sewable adhesive (the purple colour print one) 

Various scrap fabric

Names printed on plain white paper which I then reverse traced onto the heat and bond PAPER SIDE

I recently made another one for my niece (have been wanting to make one for her since my daughter was born).. She particularly wanted a swan on the towel so I found this really cute one on Pinterest which I replicated :)

This is how mine turned out:

It didn't look very nice when I sewed around it as I am not good with sewing curves.. so I decided to hand-stitch (blanket stitch) the flowers and water applique. The others were too cumbersome so I decided to machine-stitch them (far from perfect.. :( )