New Wit & Whistle tea towel (plus a grommet story)

While I’m not so over the top as to color code things down to 2 or 3 specific colors only, I DO tend to work around a general color story. For example, our kitchen is predominately yellow, mint and chocolate brown, but our plate wall (as best seen in our house tour) kind of shatters the idea that those are the ONLY colors allowed.

That point made however, I just couldn’t seem to get behind our set of kitchen towels. They are a pretty color of green, which I’m usually all over, but there is literally no green in the half of the kitchen where they reside. Where is that exactly? Well, they’ve been (pun intended) hanging around our kitchen sink on the towel hook we installed back in 2011 (please forgive my lack of photography skills back then…). Although they did their job well, it was time to upgrade, especially since towels are a pretty simple and inexpensive fix.

As luck would have it, right around the time that I started pondering new kitchen towels, I caught wind of a sale Wit & Whistle was having on a new line of tea towels. With a discount code, I was able to pick up this huge silk-screened flour sack towel for around $15. Sure it was a bit of a splurge, but I like to support local designers and Amanda’s work is absolutely worthy of a little indulgence. Isn’t it gorgeous?

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I was in love with her hand-drawn geometric design, and more importantly, the colors were spot on for our kitchen.

But I wasn’t going to stop at just a new towel. The other phase of this project involved making the new towel as functional for our space as possible. If you clicked back to the original hook install post, you saw that we were simply looping our towel over the hook, as intended. While this was nice, it just WASN’T practical for a textile that gets used about 387 times a day. If I just needed to wipe my hands without taking the towel down from the hook, it would inevitably collapse in my face. And John got so sick of trying to get the towel to stay on the hook, that he would grab it from both ends and loop the entire thing over the hook, which I just couldn’t stand.

My immediate solution to the problem was to chop a little hole in the towel using kitchen sheers so that it was literally punctured by the hook. This worked perfectly and John dubbed it the most amazing project I had ever completed, but it didn’t look very nice, especially after washing the towel a few times left unsightly frayed edges.

There was no way my new tea towel was going to get the same half hazard treatment, so I instead picked up a pack of grommets at our local craft store. This would give me the loop-able hole I needed for the hook, but would keep the trimmed edges nice and neat.

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Thankfully, the grommets came with a handy dandy template, so I merely traced, cut and snapped the grommet halves in place. 1, 2, 3 – done!

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You can REALLY see all of the beautiful pattern in those shots above. Mod, but sort of tribal, bold without being too over the top in color – Can I please have one for each bathroom now too? K – Thanks!

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Although I wish the grommet was a glossy white rather than black, I am super pleased with the overall functionality. Now I’m just curious to see if it’s washable with the grommet in place…Anyone else have any experience with this type of thing?

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