How to Personalize Beach Towels

These personalized beach towels take a few minutes to make and will help you and the kids stay organized when you head to your favorite swimming spot. They won’t lose these cool towels at the public pool!

It’s simple enough to apply your child’s name, but I wanted to add a little more pizzazz so I created mermaid and shark styles for the beach towels in Silhouette Studio.

Notice how the text is backwards? You have to mirror your designs when you use heat transfer vinyl.

I used purple EasyWeed for the mermaid text and red EasyWeed for the shark text. The mermaid heart is cut out of purple Glitter and the shark heart is cut out of red EasyWeed Electric.

Before you send the design to the cutter make sure the image is mirrored and that you have put the material on the cutting mat with the carrier side down. The carrier side has the shiny plastic backing. Also, it’s a good idea to do a test cut. Everyone’s cut settings vary on how worn their blade is. My blade is pretty new, so if you’re working with an older blade you might have to make some adjustments to my suggested settings. To do a test cut on the Silhouette Cameo go to “Cut Settings”, “Editing”, and scroll down to “Test Cut.”

I have found that I can use the same cut settings for most materials in the EasyWeed Family. They are “Heat Transfer Vinyl: Smooth” with Blade: 2, Speed:5, Thickness: 5. For the purple Glitter heart I used “Heat Transfer Material: Flocked” with Blade: 3, Speed 5, Thickness: 10.

When the materials are cut, weed out the vinyl that’s not needed for the design.

This is what your transfers will look like on the back side of the material.

This is what your transfers look like on the front of the material. This is the side that goes up for heat application.

I applied the heat transfer vinyl on the beach towels so that when they would be laid out at the beach the fun text will be above their head and their names will be in the left corner by their sandy toes.

The names were a quick step in the personalized beach towels process. Set your heat press to 305°F and pre-press the towel for a few seconds with a heat transfer cover sheet to protect the material. Align the HTV, place a cover sheet over it and press for 15 seconds. Peel the carrier sheet while it’s hot and now you have a personalized beach towel that will save any confusion over what towel belongs to what person.

For the text on top, I folded my towel in half long ways and used a piece of thermo tape to mark the spot. I used it as a guide to line up the words in the center of the towel. I pressed the EasyWeed text using the same process as the names. When I got to the Glitter heart, I turned the heat press temperature up to 320°F and pressed for 15 seconds. Peel Glitter’s carrier sheet when it’s warm.

This craft would also be great for bath towels! Want to know who’s been leaving that soppy towel on the floor instead of hanging it up? Add HTV names to your towels and I bet you’ll solve that mystery.

What have you been making with Siser heat transfer vinyl this summer? Make sure you use #SiserNA when you post your projects so we can see your creativity!