Tips & Tricks: Hand Towel Bibs

Clean up your child's eating messes before they even happen.

Hand towels are great for cleaning up messes, and not always in the way you'd expect. If you use hand towel bibs when feeding your young child, your hand towels will be cleaning up the mess before it even gets made. Hand towel bibs are easy to use and make, even if you don't have much sewing experience. These hand towel bib tips and tricks will keep your kitchen twice as clean in half the time.

How to make hand towel bibs

Making bibs from hand towels is going to require just a few basic items:

Hand towels

Velcro, buttons, or some form of child-safe clasp

Ribbing or collars from old t-shirts

Needle and thread, or sewing machine

To begin, measure the length of your chosen hand towel and divide that number by 3. If you don't have a tape measure available, just fold the longest portion of your hand towel in 3, like you would a piece of paper to fit it into an envelope.

To position the neck hole on your hand towel bibs, measure the width of the towel and divide by two, or just fold the hand towel in half width-wise. The center of the neck hole should be at the point of the first length-wise fold. If that seems too complicated, make the first length-wise fold, and then just measure in 2 or 3 inches from either side and mark those spots.

Once those points have been marked, measure about an inch and a half down from the center point of the first fold. Mark that spot and repeat on the other side of the hand towel. When you unfold the hand towel, you should now have 5 points: one 2 to 3 inches in at either side, one at the center, one above the center and another below. Using those points as guides, cut an oval for the neck hole of your hand towel bibs.

Next, use the ribbing or old t-shirt collars to decorate the neck holes of your hand towel bibs. These can be stitched by hand or using a sewing machine. How elaborate you want to get depends on how decorative you want your hand towel bibs to be. If they're just to prevent unwanted cleanup, you probably don't need to worry about whether seams or stitching are showing.

However, if you're using nice towels for your hand towel bibs, you may want to further decorate them with embroidered names or iron-on prints.

For a tighter fit, you can also design the ribbing or t-shirt collars to open and close using Velcro or buttons. This will help prevent food dropping down inside the hand towel bibs in case your child likes to play with the collars.

Not all hand towel bibs need be for children either. If you're fond of foods that sometimes make for messy eating, good looking adult hand towel bibs can be made from quality hand towels. Just be sure to adjust accordingly for neck sizes and use appropriately sized hand towels.

More information on hand towels