AN ODE TO THE TEA TOWEL

I’d like us all to take a moment to celebrate the humble Tea Towel.

They should be so boring, so mundane, yet, they have been commandeered into statement pieces. The ones we choose ourselves or the ones that we are gifted say an awful lot about who we are—far more than their lowly raison d'être would warrant. I’d wager you could tell almost as much about a person from their tea towel collection as rifling through their bin.

Whether you are someone whose tea towels are tastefully and carefully coordinated with your kitchen, or someone who once, twenty years ago, mentioned in passing how great frogs are and now find that, two decades on, everything including your tea towels has frogs on and you are rueing the day the words passed your lips.

Or maybe you collect one on every trip you go on, each place visited commemorated in a rectangular piece of cloth.

Comedic tea towels with witty reference to your preference for a G&T? Or a slightly rude tea towel perhaps?

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Image: Radical Tea Towel's A Woman Here Has Registered to Vote tea towel

Beautiful hand-printed tea towels by your favourite maker or artist? Or too wonderful to use for their intended purpose?

Tongue twisters or limericks to entertain during home economics?

Image: Selvedge's new subscriber gift of Molly Mahon tea towel set

Perhaps your tea towel represents your true feelings, your beliefs and passions? My go-to place for inspirational tea towels is Radical Tea Towels, a fabulous small, family-run British company. I’m confident my tea towels say a lot about me and I will let you draw your own conclusions from that!

So, next time you are drying up, or drying your hands upon the humble tea towel, give it a second thought and celebrate what it says about you.

Written by Hester Thorp, Customer Service lead at Selvedge.

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Members of our lovely Selvedge team have taken the time to write a festive blog post each for us this year. It's thanks to all their hard work that we're able to do what we do. Cheers to them!