DIY Towel Cake Tutorial

I saw this absolutely adorable towel cake on pinterest. Unfortunately the pin was horribly done and the pinner pinned a picture that was not from the original site. The picture was from a round up, which would have been fine but the blogger doing the round up did not properly cite their source and the source just went to a picture. (For those of you on pinterest please please pin properly and pin the original site that the item was posted on, it is rude to the people looking at your pin as well as the original poster who doesn't get their credit) So I did a little more digging (looked really closely at the photo) and noticed that there was a website imprinted on the picture (which is actually a really good idea that I should probably start doing, anyone know how to do that?). So I visited the site and dug around there and finally found her post about her towel cake. Unfortunately the post did not have very many directions for how to do it so I still had to make it up on my own. She also did a diaper cake that did have some better directions, but it wasn't exactly what was needed so I thought I would post a tutorial on how I made this wonderful towel cake.

Towel Cake 

Materials:

• Cardboard
• Aluminum Foil
• Tape (both scotch and packing)
• 2 plastic containers (dollar tree, $1 for both)
• Towels (I think I used 13, depending on how thick your towels are you may need more or less)
• Utensils (I used several kitchen utensils, if you wanted to do a bath themed towel cake you  could do things like a loofah and such. You can get utensils at dollar tree for $1 each)
• Ribbons (I used a cute colorful tissue paper (dollar tree), tulle (dollar tree), and a cute ribbon I found in the dollar bin at Michael's)
• Filler decorations (I used tulle and raffia string from dollar tree)
• Flower decorations (I used soap flowers I found at dollar tree)

Directions:

Get a cardboard square to cut your circle out of. I used a car seat base box because it was wide enough to fit a towel cake in the size I wanted. To make sure that I was cutting a square I cut off the top flap and laid it along the side.

Cut the square into a circle.

Cut the aluminum foil long enough to cover the cardboard.

Use tape to adhere the aluminum foil to the back.

The tape in the middle was not a problem because it was covered by the cake. I wish I would have cut the second sheet of aluminum foil a little longer because I had to put tape on the outer edge and it did show.

Gather your towels. I used towels that I already owned because I had plenty extra and I knew my sister wouldn't mind. Also I considered this more of a decoration than a gift (although she did get to keep all the stuff :). If you are doing this as a present or something I would buy new towels. Last I checked Target had the best price for towels because you could get a group of them for 1 price (I had to look a little to find them, but they were there a couple years ago).

Tape the two containers to the base. I used the containers to give the bottom layer some bulk. It would have taken a lot of towels to fill in that area.

Fold 1 towel in fourths lengthwise and wrap around the containers. I used packing tape to stick the towels to the container and each other.

Fold the towels in half and continue wrapping around each other. I decided that I wanted the base color of the cake to be white so I used white towels on the outside of the roll. The bottom layer was a little wide for 1 towel to cover the whole outside so I made sure the last 2 towels were white and turned the area that looked less good toward the wall.

The second and third layers were all towels. Again tape the towels to each other. For the top layer in thirds to make it shorter.

Stick skewers through the middle to keep the layers together.

Before decorating

Use the ribbons to decorate the layers. I used tissue paper cut into strips, tulle, and brown sheer ribbon. Experiment a little until you find a good combination.

Choose a utensil to be the cake topper. Wrap some of the ribbon around it and tie a bow.

Decorate with utensils

Stuff tulle into the towels between the layers

Stuff in any other fillers you are using

Decorate with fake flowers

Up Close

Doesn't This look Great? I love how it turned out! It was the perfect decoration for the gift table!

Linked Up To:
Shaken Together, Serendipity and Spice, My Favorite Finds, Clean and Scentsible, Uncommon, Cornerstone Confessions, A Pinch of Joy, Nap Time Crafters, Frugal Girls, While He Was Napping,