Why I Enjoy Designing Tea Towel Calendars

Disclosure: If you choose to buy one of my Spoonflower designs, I do receive a small percentage of the sale.

My Spoonflower shop has been very much on the backburner this past year; launching the stationery shop has taken what free design time I have. But I still made time to make a new tea towel calendar and update my older designs to 2026 this year because they are still one of my favorite things to design.

As long as I can remember, my grandmother has had a tea towel calendar hanging in her kitchen, with beads sewn on the birthdays of every family member. Sometimes the beads are color-coded by generation; now that we’re at the point where we have not just great-grandchildren but their spouses and children, we use alphabet beads to help remember who is on which date. My grandmother’s own birthday is in late December, and someone in my family has always appointed themselves the person who was getting the tea towel for her as a present. When I first discovered Spoonflower but was not yet designing my own fabric, I bought someone else’s tea towel calendar. But since I started selling my own designs on Spoonflower, I have always made a tea towel calendar and always purchased a copy to make my grandmother’s birthday wall hanging.

Attaching the beads to a previous year’s calendar.

I have a particular affection for graphic design for practical objects – this is one of the reasons I gravitate to typography art for the stationery shop and why I enjoy publication layout work. Having to make something with a particular aesthetic that also is easy to read puts a certain constraint on the design and I enjoy that challenge. Designing something that’s going to be printed on fabric is yet another design constraint; this year’s new calendar is heavily inspired by the typography style of my ”Frogged” greeting cards, but upon receiving my test sample* it became clear that I needed to make some adjustments.

*-Spoonflower no longer requires you to print actual fabric samples to put designs up for sale but I always print a full fat quarter sample of my newest calendar because it’s really important to have good color contrast between your text and background on a calendar, and it’s hard to see that on an online proof or paper vs. fabric.

If you look at this first photo, see how muddy the yellow on the thinner letters appears (particularly the “C”s and “R”s)? I subsequently dialed back the thickness of the black outline in hopes of reducing that - the updated photo is on the left. (I didn’t tweak the blue background, the daylight on the first photo is just washing it out.) Maybe I’m being nitpicky, but it’s the kind of design detail I notice.

In recent years, the trend for tea towel calendars on Spoonflower has been to emphasize the graphic elements over the actual calendar. Last year’s contest winner, which I really loved, is a great example of this.  But as my grandmother is getting older, she’s having issues with her eyesight, so my last two calendars in particular have bucked this trend as I tried to get the calendar dates as large and high contrast as I could. My calendars are definitely intended to be wall hangings rather than folded over a kitchen towel rack!

I’d like to believe that how much I love making these designs, even for my audience of one, comes through even on a site as impersonal as Spoonflower. I have sold more tea towel calendars than yards of fabric over the last five years, so perhaps it does. I hope to sell a few tea towel calendars this year, but even if I don’t, I know I have at least one person who will be looking forward to receiving this year’s version.

All of my updated calendars can be found here – they all come in English, Spanish, French, and German versions. Calendars can be purchased fully hemmed from Spoonflower or you can purchase a fat quarter and hem it yourself as a cheaper option (I recommend the Linen Cotton Canvas for sturdiness). They have sales all the time these days so if it’s not currently on a discount, wait a few days!