Whenever I’m Treasure Hunting for Redux or browsing at places like Oakland Museum of California’s White Elephant Sale, I keep a keen eye out for interesting vintage kitchen towels, aka tea towels.  They’ve become rare beasts in the last few years – I’m not the only one on the hunt!  With the least bit of encouragement from you, my pets, I would be happy to show you a few of my better finds, but the truth is that I don’t usually keep the vintage tea towels that I find.  Instead, I use them to “wrap” presents, and off they go to live in new homes (I’ve noticed that using new pretty tea towels to wrap presents is a bit of a trend for customers at Alameda Natural Grocery’s Pantry).  Do you hunt for vintage towels, too?  Like me, do you sometimes find calendar tea towels?  Do you ever get really lucky and find a calendar tea towel from a year that means a lot to you?  Well, I did a few years back:  I found a handsome calendar tea towel from the Mister’s birth-year – in French and German, no less – which I bought to display on his birthday.  And as I stood in our home, with the towel in hand, wondering where it ought to be displayed, it occurred to me that it could use a little embellishment.  It needed a heart around his birthday, that’s what it needed, so I rummaged in my stash for a bit of red embroidery floss, found a wide-eyed embroidery needle, and soon the towel sported a heart.  I used a chain stitch to outline a heart around his birthday, and you could do the same around a special day in your life:  a birthday or an anniversary, perhaps?  I think this also would be a lovely idea to mark recent or upcoming events, like a wedding or graduation, or the anticipated birth of a baby.  And you needn’t be dependent upon the fickle gods of vintage finds blessing you with an appropriately-dated tea towel!  A simple search on Etsy came up with a fair number of tea towel options for years after 1960, and some pretty rockin’ options for this year and last.  And if you don’t trust your needle skills, you could outline a heart around that special date free-hand or with a stamp…

ACK!  I’ve just noticed the time, which is rather late if I want to get any projects done before I totter off to the gym, so I’ll sign off now, my pets.  I have great hopes to post again this week – on Friday or Saturday, if all goes well – because I simply must talk with you about washing clothes by hand.  No, really, we ought to chat about this, as I want to inspire you to be better about doing it than I am.  Reading about hand laundry won’t be nearly as tedious as actually doing hand laundry, I promise.  I’ll throw in some pretty pictures to sweeten the deal – won’t that help?  Fondly, your little munakins

The Houseproud kitchen has a new curtain.  I also (heart) sewing my own curtains, especially when they don’t turn out wonky.