How To Fold a Towel Person

Lame Adventures in a towel

I hadn’t really thought about making a towel person until V of Lame Adventures mentioned in a comment that she thought I could make her in a towel.  Of course trying to make a towel sculpture of a specific person is harder than just making a random towel person.   For a specific person you need to find some characteristics of that person you can imitate in a towel. Start with a towel in the closest shade you can find to the person’s skin color.  Which is not easy as towels don’t tend to come in colors that resemble anything near human skin tones.  I do have one hand towel I found in a thrift shop that works pretty well for caucasian skin.  Luckily only the head towel color matters.  Any color works for the body towel since people wear clothes.

banner photo snagged from Lame Adventures blog

Since I am making this towel person to resemble an actual person it would be nice for anyone reading this to know what she looks like.  So I jacked her photo from the banner on her blog.

Curling ribbon or yarn would make great hair for towel people.  Curling ribbon for curly hair, which works fine if you want yellow, red, or white hair since curling ribbon is easy to find in those colors.   I could not find any in brown or black.  Yarn comes in all sorts of colors and makes great straight hair.  Of course V has to be difficult and have curly brown hair.  Sigh.  Pipe cleaners is all I could find to make dark curly hair.  These were actually called fuzzy craft sticks, but same thing.

The other distinguishing feature she has is glasses, and luckily I have some of those.  Cheap baby clothes are plentiful at thrift stores and sized about right for towel people.   I couldn’t find tiny gloves for the hands in the middle of the summer and was too cheap to buy tiny socks for the feet, which would be the obvious things to use.

Supplies Needed to Make a Towel Person

hand towel in skin tone

bath towel any color

baby clothes if desired

decorations – this is what brings the towel person to life, whatever you use for eyes, hair, hands and feet, mouth, and any other embellishments like glasses or a purse or shoes

How to Fold a Towel Person Head

Make sure the ends are exactly even. This towel needs the ends adjusted before rolling because one side hangs a bit lower than the other.

Hang the hand towel from a wall hook or tuck it under your chin.  Roll both sides as tightly as you can.  Mine tend to come out a bit lopsided now.  As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I broke my left elbow inside the joint last spring.  Both the doctor and therapist had very low expectations for me, but it did heal better than either of them expected.  It will never be 100% though and there are some positions that arm can’t achieve.  It also lacks in strength and dexterity, with two of the fingers trying to function as a single unit.  So I can’t ever roll both sides evenly any more.

Roll towel from the top so the end gets very tight while making the entire pair of rolls as tight as possible.

With the rolls to the outside, roll from the wide end to the point.  Leave just enough towel for ears hanging out at the end and tuck the point end in between the rolls with a bit sticking out for the nose.  For more photos on the various stages of folding a towel head, see the leprechaun towel folding blog.

the ears on this head need some adjusting to even them out

after folding and tucking things in the ears even out and look more human

Pointy ears work fine for things like cats, elves, or Vulcans, but since this is a human, shape the ears rounder by tucking ends in as needed.  Tuck in more on one side than the other if necessary to even the ears out as I had to on this one.

I have little blue jeans and a tiny sweatshirt to dress my towel human, mainly because that is what the thrift store had that did not look completely babyish.  So I’m using a light blue towel for the body.  It can be the shirt and will go with the rest of the outfit.

How to Fold a Towel Human Body

try to roll the two halves of the towel as evenly as possible

The towel person uses the standard towel animal body used in the majority of towel animals.  Lay the bath towel out flat.  From the short side roll each end to the center.

the tips just need to pull out enough to hold onto them in the next step

Fold rolled towel in half, rolls to the outside.  Pull the tips out of the center of each roll.

pull the tips so the towel pulls out the ends of the rolls and forms legs

Taking the two halves of one roll in one hand and the two halves of the other roll in the other hand, pull all four until the rolls pull out into legs (or in this case arms and legs) and the towel resembles a body.

If you don’t have the hand or arm strength to pull all four rolls at once, let one side go and use both hands to pull just one side of the body at a time

it looks the same in the end whether you pulled all the legs together or one side at a time

If you lack the hand strength to pull them all at once, just get it started a bit and then pull each side separately.  I have to do it that way now since I can’t pull it all at once.

not quite a person yet

When the towel body is done it is time to dress it and add the head.

the towel person could be done at this point as a little boy if I used different eyes

Finishing the Towel Person

The leprechaun’s clothes is the body plus belt and boots

Yoda’s robe is just a towel

Dress the towel person body as desired (which could be as simple as putting it in a sitting position and draping another towel around it like a robe or using the body towel as clothing.)

Position the body as desired and add  decorations – eyes, hair, etc.

Finishing touches on the lame adventures towel person included eyes, glasses, gloves, socks, and hair as well as the little jeans and sweatshirt.   She was positioned to imitate the picture.  She kind of reminds me of the old original cabbage patch dolls back when they had yarn hair.

For other towel creations please visit My Cruise Stories Towel Animal Page.

copyright My Cruise Stories 2014