Drying dishes with Daphne Padden

ToDryFor is delighted to present a new, vintage-inspired range of tea towels featuring original 1950s/1960s tissue paper collage designs by highly-collectible artist, Daphne Padden (1927-2009). When Daphne sadly died in 2009, unused collages were discovered in her studio and with the permission of her estate have been restored by vintage poster gurus, Quad Royal, and transformed by ToDryFor into stunning, linen union tea towels.

To give you a bit more background, these fantastic designs actually began life as cut-tissue paper collages; the glue hadn't aged well so they needed a little bit of a digital clean-up before they were ready to dry dishes.

Daphne Padden’s work originally came to our attention in 2010 when her iconic series of 1950s travel posters were uncovered in a disused passageway in London Underground’s Notting Hill Gate station (see image below).

This image is an official London Underground photograph; to view more visit their amazing flickr set.

Find out more about Daphne Padden and view the full vintage-inspired tea towel range here...

High Five!

It's ToDryFor's 5th birthday on Wednesday and we're planning a little something special to celebrate. We'll be selling our top five best-selling tea towels (see below) at £5 for 5 hours and, even more exciting, the first 5 people to order get one for 5p (RRP £9.95)*!

Ooh-La La! 

by Darling Clementine

The Bearded Lady 

by One Must Dash

 Heaven
by Rob Ryan

Storm in a Teacup 

by HelloWilson

Pugs Not Drugs 

by Gemma Correll

So, let's break it down again...
5 at £5 for 5 hours and 5 get them for 5p. Give us a high five!

The above towels will be on sale for £5 between 12pm and 5pm (GMT) on Wednesday 6th March 2013. That's Mother's Day sorted.

* Only one 5p tea towel per order (we'll refund £4.95 back to the 5 quick-off-the-mark lucky customers).

2013 Design Competition Winner!

Boy o boy! We received more design competition entries this year than ever before and it was a mammoth task trying to choose a winner. Some were highly commercial whilst others were completely obscure but utterly incredible; some just simply depicted cats that we fell in love with. However, we had to make a final decision and this is it...

Le Tour was created by William Wright, a Graphic Design and Illustration student from Leicester. We love everything about these two bicycle-obsessed chaps, from the snuffly moustache to the frisson of competition between the two of them. Not to mention that, dare we say it, the design is very 'on trend' what with Bradley Wiggins's recent rise to fame and the Tour de France coming to Yorkshire in 2014.

Le Tour is now going into production and will be showcased at this year's Pulse show at London's Earls Court, available in the shops and via ToDryFor.com in May. Woop!

We'd like to say a massive thank you to everyone who entered - we appreciate that it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with a design, and we're just sorry that we can only have one winner. We'll shortly be putting together a 2013 facebook gallery of our favourite runners-up - keep your peepers peeled to see if your design made the final cut...