Want some warmth in the winter: Nostalgic kitchen towels

ooking at kitchen designs in my my nesting magazines and blogs recently, I realized that what seems appealing in the summer and spring – the clean-lined, uncluttered counters and stainless appliances – becomes cold and overly sparse in the fall and winter. Instead, I crave a little clutter, spices, fruits and vegetables on display – and some cozy kitchen textiles.

I made these cozy, nostalgic kitchen towels with crocheted toppers for Mike’s grandma when we visited her in California about a year ago. Here is one of them on the right.

They are many tutorials around the Web on how to make these towel toppers, so I decided to leave it to other talented crocheters and knitters to explain all the details.

In a  few words, here’s what I did. I bought a small towel at Target (the size of a hand towel, but not as fluffy – the towel on the picture above felt like it was microfiber), cut it in half across, and blanket-stitched the raw edge. Here is a great explanation of how to do blanket stitching. In other towel-topper tutorials, people just punch holes in the fabric with a big needle, or a nail, and crochet directly through the holes. I used the blanket stitch “loops” as a base for a row of single crochet. Then, gradually decreasing in each row as I went, I crocheted single crochet or double crochet rows. The resulting shape of the topper is like a paddle – wide at the base and tapering into a fairly narrow strip at the top. At some point, I also made a vertical buttonhole at the top of the narrow strip and finished with a rounded edge. The last step was to attach a button small enough to pass through the buttonhole easily, and – done!

Here are a couple more pictures of that towel from last year:

And here are two pictures of a twin towel from Massachusetts, scheduled to be shipped to California in a couple of days.

Of course, if I am to be completely honest, my kitchen is always filled (cluttered?) with produce, cookbooks, appliances and other stuff on display, no matter the season. But, a girl can aspire, right? What is your kitchen style? Does it change depending on the month of the year?