I love new beginnings! The world is sparkly and new, everything fits perfectly together in your mind, and nothing has gone wrong. (This won’t last, but that is also part of the process. For an excellent blog post on navigating roadblocks check out Kate White’s post on the Schacht Blog.)
I’m starting my Year of Weaving for the Home in the kitchen for two reasons. One: my favorite drying towels have holes in them. Two: I already have prototypes that I like that were rejected from the updated version of Weaving Made Easy—I wove five projects from which the editors were to pick two. I envision a nice pile of sweetly colored towels that I can grab from to dry my hands. I do this all the time because we don’t have a dishwasher.
The prototype towels are made from cottolin. Cottolin gives you the best of both fibers—the softness and absorbency of cotton and the luster of linen. Louet provided me with the yarn for the prototypes in a lovely array of colors. Louet’s cottolin is on my favorite kind of mini cone (you will see why in a future post).
The structure of this towel is crammed and spaced. The warp is a solid color with three yarns in a slot and one in a hole. The weft is a second color. To select colors I had my two prototypes that already gave me a lot of information. The two towels shown in the first photo of this post were woven on the same warp. One towel’s weft was a closely related color, and the other towel’s weft was a more complementary color—technically a split complement. To me, the two closely related colors were more successful, creating a lovely richly-colored cloth. For an excellent tutorial on picking colors click here. Keep in mind that woven colors interact with one another in ways that can shift their appearance.
To sample colors, I take strips of yarn in the proportion that they will be used in the woven cloth and play around with them. This cloth has a 3:1 ratio of colors. For my towels, I’m picking the first three combinations on the left, changing the proportion of green to blue in the original towel.
Next step: warping. Stay tuned.
Liz
