More Towels

With all the horrible weather going on, it seems appropriate that I settle into the studio and do some weaving. I’ve a commission for a dozen dishtowels that will coordinate with the requestor’s kitchen. She invited me over about a month ago to have a look and get me started. Fortunately, she’s patient (I said March-end!) and now that taxes and such are behind me, I’m happy to get back to it.

Her kitchen is beautiful. It’s done up in a European style; a mixture of what look like Italian, Spanish and French influences. The main color is white – cabinets, walls and shelving are all painted white – with strong accents of cobalt, tomato and a deep yellow. One wall has a set-in shelf that’s framed by an arched opening and the back wall of the shelf is done in a yellow/cobalt tile. All the knobs on the cabinets are the rich tomato red and the countertops are a deep olive/blue. There’s some unfinished wood for the worktable, but otherwise, that’s the deal. Other than saying that her favorite color is green and she’d prefer “no pink”, it’s all on me.

My plan is to do two sets of six. That means two warps and I’ll weave off towels (likely) in pairs. The first warp will be red-focused and the second either deep blue or deep green. I’ve just finished winding the first warp this morning and I’ll have it beamed, threaded, sleyed and tied-on by mid-afternoon. I’ll be rewarding myself with a trip down the hill, away from the cold and rain, and I get to do so once the loom is ready.

I played around with colored pencils quite a bit to get the stripes how I wanted them. The colors, of course, are pure Sara – red, gold, purple. I used the yellow to make the purple “pop” and as an edging to the wider bands of red. When designing, I divided the towel into three equal parts and then put the stripes in among them. I needed to do some balancing on the two outside panels so I increased the width on the selvedge, which made the inner band a bit narrower. Since they were butting against a wide stripe of red anyway, I was fine with it.

The threading is dead easy; thread a straight twill until you come to a color change, then reverse it. Reverse again next color change, and so on, and so on, across the warp. I made sure that each band is a multiple of 4 so no figuring of heddles – it all comes out even in the end. I just grab the next in line and off I go. As a hedge, I played with the setup in PixieLoom to make sure that my thought process was a good one. The software said “yep” so now I’ve leapt off the bridge. Here’s a close-up of the direction change at a stripe.

Naturally, I don’t have enough of the red yarn to weave off all six. That’s actually a blessing in disguise since I can do two (or three) and then weave off the other two in some other color. I think the purple will be spectacular.

And, because I’m so excited about weaving again, I’m going to wind off the rest of the yarn I dyed for my Horoscope shawl that turned out so scratchy. FWIW, I took it along when I went to Palm Springs two weekends ago and we put it in the washing machine. Very little difference in the feel of the fabric so it’s time to try something else. I’m going to sett it at 30 this time (the first was at 24) and weave it off with something fine – like that 30/2 (that’s actually 60/4 – or, 60/2/2) that I’ve left over from my other shawl. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.