Ask a teacher about end-of-year presents, and you’ll hear about the mugs.
Candles, chocolates, hand cream, and at least one tea towel with an apple on it. Lovely, and mostly regifted by February.
A class tea towel isn’t that. It has every child in the room on it, drawn by themselves, with their name written underneath in their own wobbly hand.
Families keep it because it’s the year their kid was seven. Teachers keep it because nobody else can give them one.
If you’re the class rep, or the teacher organising it yourself, the job is smaller than it looks. It takes one lesson and one order form.
The only number that needs real thought is how many to order.
Collect Every Drawing in One Lesson
The whole class can do this in 20 minutes if the materials are ready before the kids sit down.
If you’re the class rep, those 20 minutes are the one thing you need to ask the teacher for.
Before the lesson:
- Cut A4 paper in half to make A5 cards. One per child, plus five spares for the inevitable restart.
- Hand out black fine-tip textas. Not pencil, which photographs grey and faint. Not crayon, which breaks up into a waxy, broken line when it’s enlarged.
- If you’re going full-colour digital (more on that below), coloured textas are fine. For a one-colour screen print, stick to black.
The brief to the kids:
- Draw yourself, big. Face and shoulders filling the card, not a tiny person in the middle of a lot of white paper.
- Write your first name along the bottom edge. In their own writing, not the teacher’s. That’s what turns 26 drawings into a signed towel.
Collect the cards before the bell, every one of them.
Anyone away that day gets a blank card and a texta in their bag with a return date.
Chase those early, because one missing face on a class towel is the only thing anyone will notice.
Then photograph them.
Lay each card flat in daylight near a window, hold the phone straight above it, and keep your own shadow off the paper.
One drawing per photo.
The order form takes the photos as a bulk upload, and you choose the border and print colour on the same page.
You don’t need to lay anything out. We arrange the drawings and send a proof for approval before anything is printed.
Handprints work too, though they need a different technique: roll or sponge the paint onto the hand rather than dipping it.
That’s a kindy job more than a Year 2 one, so it has its own page on kindy and childcare tea towels.
How many drawings fit? Between 30 and 60 look best, and the artwork is included for up to 60 drawings on the online order.
So a single class fits easily, and two classes sharing one towel works well too. Past that, it starts to look crowded.
There’s more detail, with examples, on how many drawings fit on a tea towel.
Make the Teacher’s Copy the Signed One
The teacher’s towel is the same design as everyone else’s, and that’s the point. It’s the class they taught, all in one place.
Put the teacher in it. Their own self-portrait goes in the centre, where a school logo would usually sit, with a line above the drawings: “Room 4 with Ms Ng, 2026”.
If the towel is a surprise, get the kids to draw the teacher on one of the spare cards and pick the best one. With every child’s name under their own face, it’s already signed by the whole class.
Order one for the aide as well. And any specialist teacher who’s been in that room every week. They notice when they’re left out.
There’s a quieter reason a tea towel works as the class gift: it doesn’t create a problem for the teacher.
In NSW public schools, a gift “valued at more than $50” has to be declared and reported to a manager before staff can accept it.
Western Australia counts a group gift by its total, not by each family’s share.
Gifts of appreciation are token at $100 or less, and it’s “the aggregated value of the gift (rather than the individual contribution by each donor)” that decides it, under the WA Department of Education’s gifts procedures.
So a voucher pooled at $10 a family from 26 families is a $260 gift, over both lines. A tea towel that costs about $10 isn’t.
Independent and Catholic schools set their own rules, so check yours if you’re unsure.
How Many to Order When Families Want Two
Most class reps guess this number, and guessing costs money.
Some families will want one towel. Plenty will want two: one for the kitchen and one wrapped up for the grandparents at Christmas.
A few will want three. You won’t know until you ask, so ask before you order. A one-line note home does it: “Class tea towel, $X each, how many would you like?”
Then count:
- One per family that said yes
- Every second and third towel
- The teacher, the aide and any specialist teacher
- Two spares, for the new kid who arrives in week 8 and the towel that goes missing
Now check where that total lands on the price table, because the per-towel price drops at 30, 50, 75 and 100.
Take a class of 26. Ten families want a second towel. Add the teacher and the aide, and the total is 38. On one-colour screen printing, 38 towels at $12.29 is $467.02 plus GST.
Fifty towels at $9.63 is $481.50 plus GST. That’s 12 more towels for $14.48, or about $1.21 each.
Once a screen-printed order reaches 40 towels, ordering 50 costs less than ordering what you need.
The same jump happens at every price break. On one-colour screen printing:
- 40 to 49 towels: order 50
- 64 to 74 towels: order 75
- 89 to 99 towels: order 100
On full-colour digital, the same thing happens from 43 towels (order 50), 70 (order 75) and 96 (order 100).
And the extras don’t go to waste. Families who said one often ask for another once they’ve seen it. The spares cover the late enrolments and the grandmother who hears about it in January.
One warning: don’t round up before you’ve asked. Rounding up from a counted 38 is cheap. Ordering 50 on a hunch and finding only 22 families want one is not.
What a Class Tea Towel Costs
These are per-towel prices on a 100% cotton tea towel, including the towel and the printing, plus GST.
100% Cotton Tea Towel
The price (each) includes the tea towel and the printing (+ GST)
| Print Method/Qty | 20-29 | 30-49 | 50-74 | 75-99 | 100-149 |
| Full-Colour Digital Printing | $17.15ea | $17.00ea | $14.38ea | $13.29ea | $12.66ea |
| 1 Colour Screen Printing | N/A | $12.29ea | $9.63ea | $8.09ea | $7.15ea |
Artwork charges apply where applicable. Contact us for a quote.
One-colour screen printing is the cheaper option from 30 towels. Every drawing prints in a single ink colour you choose, which is why black textas matter. Most class towels are done this way.
Full-colour digital prints exactly what’s on the card, coloured textas included, and it’s the only option under 30 towels. It’s the right call for a small class or for drawings that only make sense in colour.
At 50 towels on screen printing, each towel costs $10.59 including GST. The teacher’s copy, split across 26 families, is about 41 cents each.
Artwork charges can apply in some cases, so check your quote. For an exact figure, get a quote.
If you’d like the class to raise money from the towels rather than just cover the cost, that’s a different exercise with its own numbers.
The school tea towel fundraiser page explains how it works.
Work Back From 15 November
To have the towels before Christmas, orders need to be in by 15 November 2026. That’s the cut-off on the order page for pre-Christmas delivery.
The school year ends earlier than it feels like it will. In 2026, the last day of Term 4 for state schools is Friday 11 December in Queensland, Thursday 17 December in NSW and Friday 18 December in Victoria. Many independent schools finish earlier.
So work backwards:
- Mid to late October: run the drawing lesson. Chase the absentees the same week.
- Late October: send the note home asking how many towels each family wants, with a return date.
- Early November: count, check the price table, place the order and upload the drawings.
- Before 15 November: approve the proof. It’s the last chance to catch a misspelt name.
The 15th is the day the order has to be in. It is not the day to start.
Our holiday closing and reopening dates are on the Christmas order deadlines page. Ready to go? Start your class tea towel order.
More Fundraising Tea Towels
