Personalised Tea Towels

Any photo, any words, any design, printed on a 70cm by 50cm cotton-linen tea towel and posted to your door. No minimum, so one is a perfectly normal order.

Tea towel diagram showing the 70 by 50cm towel, the 60 by 40cm print area and the minimum photo size

The design tool does the hard part. What decides whether the finished towel looks brilliant or slightly disappointing is the file you send it, and almost nobody mentions that before you order.

Start With the Photo, Not the Design

The print area on a tea towel is 60cm by 40cm, about the size of an A2 poster. Blowing a photo up that far is where personalised products usually go wrong.

Fabric is more forgiving than paper. The weave does not hold fine detail the way a glossy print does, so you do not need the 300 DPI a print shop would quote you for paper. About 150 DPI is a sensible floor, which works out at roughly 3,500 pixels on the long edge for a print that fills the towel.

Where the photo came from	Pixels	Quality at full size
Photo straight off a modern phone	4032 wide	Fine
Newer 48MP phone photo	8064 wide	Excellent
Older photo, around 8MP	3264 wide	Usable if the print is a bit smaller
Downloaded from Facebook	2048 wide	Too soft
Saved from Instagram	1080 wide	Not usable

Send the original off your camera roll, not a copy you pulled out of Facebook or a group chat.

That one habit prevents most disappointing results. Every time a photo passes through Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp it gets compressed and shrunk. The version sitting in your camera roll is several times larger than the version your sister sent you of the same picture.

If the only copy you have is small, you still have options. Keep the print smaller on the towel, where a 2000-pixel photo is perfectly sharp. Or send it to us anyway, and we will tell you honestly how it will look before anything is printed.

Scanning an old photograph? Scan it at 600 DPI rather than 300. Old prints are small, and the extra resolution is what gives you room to enlarge.

What 60cm by 40cm Actually Looks Like

Most of the towel. The towel is 70cm by 50cm, so the print area stops about 5cm short of each edge.

That matters because photos are not tea towel shaped. A landscape photo sits naturally across the width. A portrait photo, which is most phone photos of people, either runs down the length or gets cropped. A square crop leaves room underneath for a name and a date, which is usually the better-looking option anyway.

You do not have to fill the space. Some of the best ones use a fraction of it: one photo, centred, with a line of text beneath. Fill all 60cm by 40cm with a busy image, and it starts to look like a beach towel.

What People Actually Print

Grid of tea towel design ideas including a handwritten recipe, a child’s drawing, a pet and a monogram

The design tool gives you unlimited colours, photo upload and hundreds of fonts, so the constraint is ideas rather than technology. The ones that work tend to have a reason behind them.

A recipe in the original handwriting. A grandparent’s scone recipe, scanned from the card it was written on. This is the most requested personalised tea towel there is, and it is the one people keep.
A child’s drawing, printed exactly as drawn, signed and dated. Parents and grandparents both want one.
A pet. A good photo of a dog on a tea towel is a lovely gift, and nobody expects it.
A memorial. A photo, a name, the years. Something the family uses rather than stores.
A first home, photographed on the day they got the keys.
An in-joke. A phrase only that family says, set in a nice font. Cheap to make, impossible to buy.
A monogram or family name. Initials and an established year, in one or two colours. The simplest option and hard to get wrong.

Notice how few of those need design skill. Most are one good photo and a line of text.

The Materials, and Why They Matter

The 50/50 cotton-linen blend takes full-colour ink better than cotton or linen on their own, which is why it is the one on this product. Cotton alone is cheaper but flatter; pure linen is more textured.
70cm by 50cm is a full-size tea towel that actually dries dishes, not a novelty square.
The 60cm by 40cm print area leaves room for a full-bleed photograph if you want one.
Water-based inks soak into the fibre rather than sitting on top as a plastic layer. That is why a printed tea towel stays soft and keeps absorbing water, and why it does not crack the way an iron-on transfer does.
Yours is printed here in Australia, not drop-shipped.

Printing It Yourself Versus Having It Printed

Worth being straight about this, because you can absolutely do it yourself and we publish guides on how.

Making your own makes sense when the making is the point. A school holiday project, a craft afternoon, something where a slightly wonky result is part of the charm. Iron-on transfer paper and a home printer will get you there for the cost of the paper.

Having it printed makes sense when the result is the point. Iron-on transfers sit on the surface as a plastic film, so they crack, peel and go stiff after a dozen washes, and they do not absorb water. Our inks go into the fabric. You also get full colour with no fading between colours, and a print area no home iron will cover evenly.

At one towel, there is no setup cost and no minimum, so the practical difference is an afternoon of your time against a printed item posted to your door.

Looking After It

Wash it before first use, cold or warm, with like colours. The print goes into the fibre so it will not peel, and normal washing will not lift it. Tumble drying is fine, though line drying keeps any fabric looking better for longer. Do not bleach it, and iron on the reverse if you iron it at all.

Treated normally, the print outlasts the towel.

Make Yours

Open the online design tool, upload your photo or type your words, and you will see it on the towel before you buy. One is a normal order.

If you would rather someone else handled the artwork, send what you have through the quote form, and we will set it up and show you a proof first.

I was so happy when I received my tea towel. It was exactly how I envisioned it, thank you so much. Lyn Anderson

Printing for an event or a group instead? See tea towel invitations for weddings and showers, or tea towel fundraising for schools, churches and clubs.