On January first, I experienced a fire in my belly that only a New Year can bring. THIS will be the year! Every room in my house will have a new handwoven item designed just for it. I’m happy to say that unlike most of my New Year’s Resolutions this one is sticking.
I’ve tackled the first room and made a set of small, square, highly-absorbent kitchen towels designed to fit my exact needs. 
I have a compact kitchen without a lot of counter space. To accommodate a typically proportioned towel, I would have to wad it up on the rod to keep it out of the way of the compost bin. I wove a coordinating larger towel to hang on the oven handle for general use. I wrote about how I choose the structure, yarn, and color selection in an earlier post and you can see a Flipgram of the process here.
Even though I sampled first with the blue towel, I had to design on the fly as I ran out of the orange warp, hence the stripes in the second set of towels. Using the golden ratio I configured my stripes, but I still blew it as these towels were to be folded in half. To me the stripes look a bit off. The third time I tackle these towels I’ll have it down pat. This is why I keep a project notebook with all my head-smack notes.
Next Up: The Great Room
Our couch pillows get a lot of use. Every member of the family loves to lay their head on them when they are lounging, including the hound. I want fabric that is cool to the touch and hardwearing, so once again I’m turning to a linen blend. With the sample yarn that I picked up from TNNA, I revisited my inspiration stash on Pinterest. I’ve had my eye on these lovely understuffed pillows pinned from monday TO sunday HOME’s blog.
I have another motivation for moving onto this project. Unless I want to do a lot of seaming, which I don’t, the best structure to achieve my dream pillows is doubleweave I have a number of doubleweave workshops coming up including the New England Weavers Seminar and John C Campbell Folk School, and I can use a few more samples for the class.
Here is how I’m thinking about color: I will weave a small sample with the colors I have, and then evaluate the color, texture, and sett selection. I have a big crush on copper right now. I see it everywhere mixed with shades of blue in the New Mexican landscape as in this photo I took at the Bosque del Apache. The color range of Adorn isn’t broad, but there are enough to work with. Alder is closest to the color I have in my mind’s eye, but it may be on the brown side. Mixing Adorn with a solid will keep it from being too busy in the finished cloth and perhaps bring out more of the copper tones in this yarn.
To the warping board!
Liz
