Do you have one recipe that’s been passed down from generation to generation or a new one you’d like to dazzle your family with this holiday? Put a creative twist on sharing your family’s special recipes by gifting the instructions for your favorite dishes on a recipe tea towel. Order one yard of Linen Cotton Canvas to make four towels to ship out to the whole family or let us do the work and sew them for you.

Join Macharva (you may know her as Mac of @macsmakespace) and her fun-loving children, Lucas and Harper, to see how they are sharing one of their favorite recipes with their family this holiday.

Macharva: When I think of the holidays, I think of spending time preparing and enjoying meals with the people I love. In fact, there isn’t a Thanksgiving or Christmas season I can remember that my husband and I haven’t spent with one or both of our moms.

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we’ve spent the last few holidays socially distant. To bridge the physical distance, we have been searching for a more meaningful gift idea. When we learned about the recipe tea towels at Spoonflower, we knew we had found our answer!

To create our favorite No-Knead Sprouted Wheat Bread recipe tea towel, I scanned my written recipe into Photoshop to format it (find the full tutorial here) and then uploaded my file to Spoonflower to print onto fabric or sewn tea towels. The tea towels are made from a wonderful blend of cotton and linen, and wash and iron beautifully. The recipe shows up well on the fabric and makes it so simple to follow the recipe since I don’t have to worry about ruining a paper copy. What can I say—cooking with kids is messy business!

Spoonflower Tea Towel Options

Spoonflower offers tea towels two ways. You can order a fat quarter or yardage of Linen Cotton Canvas to DIY the project or let our sewing team work their magic and order ready-made tea towels. Check out our tea towel guidelines for helpful measurements and addition tips.
Mac’s daughter using the tea towel to bake bread.

After my custom order arrived, all I needed to do was cut and hem the tea towels before sending to our moms.

For us, food is love. It transcends all boundaries and brings people together. While the recipes on my mother and mother-in-law’s sides vary, it is wonderful to see that all blend together during this special time of year. And now, with our own recipe to add to the mix, I am envisioning the bread becoming a part of breakfast as toast, lunch as bruschetta and dinner as stuffing or croutons!

Mac shared her recipe tea towels with her family virtually before mailing them off.
Send your towels in a shipping parcel as gifts just in time for Christmas.

Learning to bake bread has been a very symbolic action this year. It has been a way to simplify what we eat and what we need to keep in our pantry—without having to sacrifice flavor and options. It has been a labor of love that we hope to share with our two moms.

This year may be the first that families are reconnecting since the pandemic. For those celebrating remotely, these tea towels will make the holidays just as special. I can already see my two moms referencing the recipe tea towels in their respective kitchens, as I am with my children. It warms my heart to think that we will have that shared experience in spite of the distance.


Family recipe tea towels are such a thoughtful, unique gift, it is no wonder they are one of our most popular DIY projects! Whether you scan your treasured recipe card or create something completely new in your favorite design program, the possibilities to customize are endless!

You can continue being inspired by checking out how 8 Spoonflower employees customized theirs. Prefer to discover some new family food traditions? Mac’s Sprouted Wheat Bread recipe is available here or browse our Marketplace to discover dishes that will test your culinary skills this holiday.

Macharva (Mac) Housley is a DIY fashion and lifestyle content creator. Mac uses her Instagram platform, @macsmakespace, to make social media more social, by creating content that is relatable and inspiring at the same time. Macharva is also the co-founder for Sew Altered Style, a women’s sewing pattern company and DIY fashion blog. During the day, she is a higher ed administrator for a private university.

Macharva lives in the DC Metropolitan Area with her husband and two rambunctious yet adorable children.  She holds a BA in Organizational Behavior & Communication from New York University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.