Working on towels

I know that I can sell a bunch of towels at the Weavers’ Guild Holiday Sale, so decided that’s what I’d work on next. I warped up the loom with that handpainted cotton shown in my last post and set about weaving. I was hoping that my dye planning worked so that each towel would have all of the colors, ideally only once.

Jack decided to photobomb my first pics, these of the two towels with dark wefts – purple on the left and marine on the right.

Here they are without Jack so you can better see the colors. The warp colors worked out well on these two.

I wove two towels with blue-ish wefts in two different shades; actually teal on the left and baby blue on the right. Again the handpainting worked out pretty well.

I wove another two towels with different yellows for wefts. Again the painting worked fine.

And I wove two towels with natural wefts, one with the 5/2 I’d used for warp, the other with 8/2. These 2, which would have been my favorites, didn’t have the handpainting land quite as well.

Still, I like the overall look of the stripes blending from one color to the next and am likely to do this again in the future.

But not right now. I went for another run of polka dots. Here’s the first towel on the loom. You can see a threading error in the 5th red circle from the right. This wasn’t the only threading error that I had, and when I found this one about 8″ in, I fixed it and then decided it was time to walk away for the day. You can also see that the use of the yellows, especially the light yellow, wasn’t a great choice. C’est la vie.

Parting shot – my kousa dogwood displaying its lovely red fruits for the fall. In the spring I was wishing I’d chosen a Florida dogwood, but now I’m glad I didn’t; they don’t fruit like this.