Dishtowels

After a bit of general information and theory at the start of Monday’s class, Tom got all of us sitting in front of a counterbalance floor loom, and we started weaving. Here’s what I made:

Four dishtowels!

I started at the bottom of that strip, with the green towel. You can see where I started out beating the ever-living crap out of the towel following each shot, and where I was when Tom came by and told me to chill out and not beat so hard.


The pattern was to knit a hem, then not quite 3” of tabby (plain weave), five repeats of our twill pattern (my loom was threaded for the “Star of Bethlehem” pattern), then 1.5” of tabby, four rows of twill, lather, rinse repeat to make it symmetrical.

My second color was chosen because I liked my classmate Misty’s first towel.


Each towel is about 24” long. They’re woven with unmercerized cotton. 10/2 in the warp, 8/2 in the weft.


My final towel was done with a dark purple. So dark it looks navy blue.


I decided that I was bored with the basic pattern, so I started messing with my twill set-up.


At this point, we’d been working on the twill samplers enough (the purple thing I showed you yesterday) that I understood that the pattern wouldn’t really emerge unless I reversed direction every so often. So instead of treadling 1, 2, 3, 4 over and over, I tried various combinations of 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1.


I’m just about certain that twill dishtowels are going to be the next project on the loom. I just need to decide how long of a warp I want to measure out (i.e. how many towels I want to weave at a time) and what twill pattern to thread for. I’m still pondering my options, but I’ll bet I have it figured out by the time I get home from my Labor Day Weekend trip to The Lake.