When we sailed on Disney Cruise Lines with some friends in September 2022, I made these personalized lounge chair towel holders/chair toppers/chair covers for us. It made it so easy to find our chairs amongst a sea of lounge chairs!
How did this all start? Well, after watching the “Life Well Cruised” YouTube Channel, I discovered that towel bands were the solution to the problems of beach towels (1) blowing away in the wind and (2) slipping off the top of a lounge chair. So I bought some towel bands on Amazon in June 2022. They were VERY useful & I could see why the vlogger said they were one of the top 10 things to bring on a cruise.
Later that same summer, while I was in the midst of making some personalized matching shirts for our families, it hit me. I could also make personalized lounge chair towel holders! My only complaint with the towel bands that I purchased is that they are too narrow to personalize. So I made these chair toppers/chair covers instead.
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| These are the matching polo shirts that I made. I drew the family name logos myself by hand (I did NOT use a font) and digitized them to use with my Cricut. |
I purchased a yard of blue and a yard of red swimsuit fabric, also known as “Performance Nylon & Spandex Fabric” from JoAnn Fabrics. I cut each yard of fabric according to the schematic below:
This yielded 6 rectangles for each color.
I used a “stretch twin machine needle” with a straight stitch on my sewing machine (I don’t own a serger) to sew it all up with a 0.5” seam allowance.
- For each individual rectangle, I folded them in half to make a 9”x19” rectangle as shown by the dotted lines in the schematic.
- I sewed the short edges shut, and then boxed the top corners about 0.25” deep.
- I then folded & hemmed the bottom edges.
The finished dimensions are about 18” wide x 8.5” tall.
I mixed acrylic paint mixed with “fabric medium” to make my own DIY fabric paint. Then I used the fabric paint with the “freezer paper stencil” technique to apply the image that I had previously designed for our personalized shirts. I prefer to use fabric paint instead of heat transfer vinyl (HTV) on all of my Cricut projects because: (1) Fabric paint can withstand many wash-and-machine-dry cycles without peeling off. (2) Instead of peeling, the fabric paint stretches and cracks in the same manner as vintage T-shirts. In contrast, HTV has limited stretch. (3) I don’t have to worry about an iron melting synthetic fabrics to apply the HTV image to the fabric. This was especially important because the fabric that I used to make the towel holders is synthetic.
To use the towel holders, we folded the beach towel over the top of the lounge chair, and then slipped a towel holder over the top of the chair to prevent the towel from blowing away or falling down. Even though these were made for a Disney Cruise vacation, we can use them for other future vacations or anytime when we’re at a pool or beach! Plus, whenever we use them, it will bring back fond memories of good times with friends!
UPDATE: These would make great Disney Fish Extender FE gifts. Except I wouldn’t personalize them. It took way too long to design each family name to look like the cruise ship logos. If you want to make these yourself for FE gifts, here’s a FREE PRINTABLE sheet that has 6 name tags.
For links to other crafts that I made for a Disney Cruise, check out: