Much Given: Owl Towel: A Hooded Adventure

My 15 month old is a hipster, already. You know those kids who love only to read or pet or play with a specific animal of choice, be it a dog or cat or bunny or horse? Well, my son has decided that those are just too common place. His animal of choice? Owls. Or as he says it, "Oowwwwwwwwwwl." It's adorable. And handy that owls are "in" (or at least they were in 2012; I hear that 2013 is the year of the raccoon).

Amber over at Crazy Little Projects has a FANTASTIC hooded towel tutorial with various types of animals, but we don't care about other animals. We just want the owl.

As a wedding gift we had been given a really nice bath towel, hand towel, and washcloth that matched our bathroom, but the only thing was, we really needed a couple more bath towels and washcloths to make a set, and I could never figure out where to get the additional towels at, so I had these just laying around.

I took the hand towel. . .

. . .cut off the fancy, decorative pieces rather than just cutting in half as Amber suggested. . .

. . .and folded a generous hem over on one raw-edge side, zigzagging with neutral colored thread on my machine.

After hemming one raw edge, I decided to trim some more off--about 5 inches--, as I felt like my towel's hood was going to be too large.

I then cut out some felt eyes and beak.

I pinned in a couple places, then just sewed the layers on without using adhesive. I changed the top thread on my sewing machine so that it would match my felt pieces. I went the lazy route (surprise, surprise) and made a flattened beak, rather than Amber's cute 3-D one.

The finished eye and beak details.

Folding the hood right sides together, I sewed the other raw edge together to make my hood.

Now here's where I began veering off Amber's much wiser course. Rather than making separate ears, I decided to experiment. She has you trim off a small bit from the pointy top of the hood. That is probably a better decision than the one I so rashly made. You can very faintly see three pins in the towel below. I am pointing to two of the pins, indicating where I was going to sew. Basically I sewed, then cut off a wide V rather than a straight line so that my owl would have built in "horns." Confused yet? Check out the next picture.

See? At this stage it still looks like a good idea. (And it mostly was, though I had to do some seam ripping later. I don't know how to do a single sewing project without use of a seam ripper.) I just cut off where I had sewn my wide V.

I then pleated my large bath towel in the middle of a long side. Please don't pleat as generously as I did. It was too much. (Seam ripping time again!) But a nice small pleat added a nice finished look to the towel.

As you can see in the picture below, the back of my hood was shorter than the front. When I took such a big chunk out of the top, I think I lost a lot of the hood, so when I attached the hood to the large towel, there was just not enough to cover my son's head well. So I seam-ripped off the hood, used the 5-inch wide slice of hand towel I had trimmed off earlier, and rounded two of the corners (as seen below). I then attached the longer, non-rounded edge of my piece to the back of the hood, then attached my hood to my towel again. Much better fit.

My son is not a cheap office chair. But he was asleep when I was taking photos, so I politely asked my cheap black office chair to pose, and he kindly did his best. (Let's not tell him that this photo will be replaced at a later date.) Anyway, here's the front side of my owl towel.