How to Turn Handwritten Recipes into Tea Towels

Read on to find out how to make your own special, easy and affordable DIY handwritten recipe tea towel. Don’t limit yourself to recipes! With the following tutorials, you can make a tea towel with any custom design. Watch the full video tutorial and check out the guides below to find out how to turn handwritten recipes into tea towels.

Do you have one recipe that’s been passed down from generation to generation? With Spoonflower, you can preserve the recipe on a tea towel that goes beyond culinary chores. It’s a heartfelt, personalized DIY that keeps cherished family memories and traditions alive. As seen in Martha Stewart and the kitchn, this heirloom Linen Cotton Canvas recipe tea towel is a classic Spoonflower project.

For many, food is the language of love, and creating a tea towel from a treasured recipe allows families to celebrate and share that love in a tangible, lasting way. Whether it’s Grandma’s signature dish typed on her favorite typewriter or a handwritten recipe card smudged with flour and time, these towels transform ephemeral moments into meaningful heirlooms.

Even the process of creating the tea towel can be touching: talking with parents about which recipe to choose, uncovering family stories along the way and reflecting on traditions that might otherwise be lost. And because you can reproduce the design for multiple family members, everyone can have a piece of history in their kitchen, sparking smiles and memories each time it’s used.

Whether it’s a holiday gift, a keepsake for future generations or a token of friendship, recipe tea towels are a meaningful and memorable way to celebrate the magic that happens in the kitchen. It’s a go-to gift idea for everyone—even those family members who are impossible to shop for!

Gifting a recipe tea towel is a beautiful way to honor a loved one and keep their memory present in the daily rhythms of life. It sparks conversations, evokes nostalgia and brings warmth into any kitchen. For those hard-to-shop-for relatives—like grandparents or aunts who “don’t need anything”—a tea towel made from a family recipe feels personal, thoughtful, and entirely one-of-a-kind.

After uploading your own family recipe to Spoonflower, you can decide to finish them yourself or order them pre-made (more on this later). Whatever option you choose, we recommend our Linen Cotton Canvas fabric for a not-so-basic kitchen towel that does it all. With a lovely natural texture, medium weight and blend of 55% linen and 45% cotton, Spoonflower’s Linen Cotton Canvas lends character to table linens while its absorbency makes it a favorite for tea towels.

With a 54” wide printable area, you can order one yard to make four perfectly sized towels to gift to the whole family. You can also have our in-house, USA-based team do the work for you! Our pre-sewn tea towels are beautifully finished and have a small fabric loop on the back for hanging.

Tech changes quickly! The instructions we tell you today may be different tomorrow. For the most up to date how-to, refer to our Help Center article for all the specifics.

While we are going to focus on making a recipe tea towel, there are so many applications for this following the same steps. If a recipe isn’t your vibe, you can upload photos, love letters, scan pressed flowers, print your child’s latest art project…The opportunities are endless. And with Spoonflower, you don’t have to limit yourself to tea towels — you can also print your designs on home decor items like pillows, table runners, throw blankets and more!

For a hand written recipe, we love the idea of it being printed on tea towels or dining products so you can enjoy with family at the table or while cooking.

To turn handwritten recipes into tea towels, we will walk through scanning your written recipe to format it and then uploading to Spoonflower to print onto fabric or pre-sewn tea towels

Spoonflower offers tea towels two ways. You can order a yardage of Linen Cotton Canvas to DIY the project, or let our team work their magic and order ready-made tea towels. Check out our tea towel guidelines for helpful measurements and addition tips.

The most important component of your handwritten recipe tea towel will be the recipe. There are a couple of ways to get a copy of this recipe onto your desktop computer.

Starting with the best image resolution possible will ensure your final design is sharp and focused. Make sure the scan or photo is bright, focused and readable. We will be printing from the design file you upload. If the original recipes are old and yellowing with discoloration, you may want to use a photo editing program to enhance them before formatting.

This option is great if you are a sewist and want to make tea towels to share!

To print four recipes on one-yard of fabric, you will need to turn each recipe into landscape orientation. Then using Photoshop, Figma, Canva or any other image layout tool, create a 54″ x 36″ 150 DPI (8100 pixels x 5400 pixels) file. This will fit exactly onto one yard of Linen Cotton Canvas and produce four tea towels.

Duplicate the recipe and arrange them into a collage. Each recipe will be on a different “layer” so you can edit and move them around as you please. You can add a grid spacing in between each image so you have a convenient cutting line.

To navigate the technical aspects of formatting your design, follow these easy guidelines and our Help Center. This template will ensure it will print and display properly on a tea towel:

Our Help Center has step-by-step tutorials to format your design on Photoshop, Canva, Fotor and Pixlr.

For DIY tea towels, save your file as a JPG, upload to Spoonflower, select the yardage and the fabric type (Linen Cotton Canvas) then add to cart!

Once your yardage arrives, all you need to do is cut and hem them before using or gifting! For added convenience, you can also sew a small length of twill in one top corner.

To order a pre-sewn tea towel, follow these easy and helpful directions for uploading your design.

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! — Macharva (Mac) Housley

Recipe tea towels continue to be an easy and affordable way to create a family heirloom. From a scanned recipe card that reflects the wear and tear of a well-loved dish to a crowd-favorite dessert, it is no wonder its one of our most popular DIY projects!

Whether you scan your treasured recipe card or create something completely new, the possibilities to customize tea towels on Spoonflower are endless!

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