If you live in certain regions of the country, you may not know what tea towels are. The term may simply not be part of your vocabulary. And you may have no idea how a tea towel is different from a dish towel. Who knew that you could get into the weeds about kitchen towels?

The use of tea towels began in Victorian England when–among the wealthy–tea changed from simple sustenance to high tea–a late afternoon social affair filled with pomp and circumstance. The need for a towel while working with a teapot is obvious, but the lady of the home wanted a towel worthy of her fine china. Therefore, the towel used for high tea was made of soft, lint-free, highly absorbent, linen or cotton. The ladies of the home often used these tea towels for embroidery, adding elegance to the humble towel.

Across the pond, American manufacturers of flour, cornmeal, rice, sugar, and feed for animals began packaging those commodities in cotton sacks around 1800. This practice continued through WWII. Industrious homemakers repurposed the tightly-woven material from these sacks for clothing and for towels. The flour sack towel was born!

When someone speaks of a tea towel today, they are referring to a descendant of the British tea towel or the American feed sack towel. You may ask, what is the best tea towel material? A tea towel must be cotton or linen, smooth, soft, absorbent, and lint-free. It may be plain, printed, or have a woven pattern. A terry cloth dish towel is not a tea towel.

Many people are looking for high quality kitchen tea towels as they look for ways to be more earth-friendly. Here are a few suggested ways to use a tea towel:

Skip the gift wrap or bag! Wrap a tea towel around a bottle of wine, a candle, a loaf of nice bread, or simply gift a set of tea towels as a house-warming gift or a gift to your hosts. Tie the package up with a ribbon.

Does your family use paper napkins? Switch to tea towels! Embroider a different image onto every towel so that family members recognize their own. Or if you don’t embroider, stitch a decorative edge with your machine in a different color for each family member. Or have each family member choose their own napkin ring and leave all the towels the same. Having two sets of tea towel napkins is nice–one in use and one in the wash.

1. How much could you decrease your paper towel usage if you kept a basket of tea towels on the kitchen counter–handy and ready for action? A hot wash with some laundry sanitizer and your tea towels are ready for use again. How many trees could you save? You might use water for your wash, but a lot of water is used in paper production–about 17,000 gallons per ton of paper.

Because so many sewists are looking for dish towels to embroider, Missouri Star is pleased to offer Aunt Martha's Tea Towels. We also offer a free, downloadable pattern for an apron you can make with one of these Aunt Martha's tea towels! We love these 20”x28” vintage striped tea towels that are hemmed on all four sides. We carry Aunt Martha's red stripe towels, Aunt Martha's retro stripe towels–which have multi-colored stripes, and Aunt Martha’s blue striped dish towels.

Aunt Martha's vintage dish towels will get softer and more absorbent as you wash them. They are 100% cotton; therefore, they may shrink a little. Aunt Martha's tea towels are a good choice for hand or machine embroidery or for cross-stitch. They are also a great choice for doing all the normal things that tea towels do–drying dishes; wiping hands; wrapping baked goods; rolling jelly rolls; covering dough while it proofs; cleaning glass, crystal, and china. We hope you will enjoy using Aunt Martha's tea towels for all of these things and more!