We all need to do things that bring us comfort while we’re staying home. For me, too often that’s baking. Here’s today effort – a luscious lemon cornmeal pound cake. Made with 1 bowl.
I ate a few slices, then sliced up the rest and put it in the freezer. Safer there.
On the weaving front, this is my next batch of towels. I’m calling them Comfort At Home. Why? Because these towels are so oatmeal-like. And what’s more comforting than oatmeal? (Readers of a certain age will remember the Wilford Brimley commercials.) Add the soft wave structure, and you’ve got a comforting towel.
In fact, although the warp of 7 towels is called Comfort At Home, each towel (or pair of towels) has an oatmeal name. Here you go, along with the info about each weft. The warp is a softly plied 8/2 barber pole cotton.
The first two towels below are Oatmeal & Brown Sugar. The weft is a 3/2 organic colorgrown FoxFibre in khaki. Since this is a fairly heavy and loosely plied weft, the towels are a bit thicker and rougher than some of the others below. If you look closely, you can see that my hemming has shown one towel ‘right side up’ and the other ‘upside down.’ It’s not uncommon that I can’t decide which side should be up when I hem.
The next towels, Plain Oatmeal, are also 3/2 organic colorgrown FoxFibre cotton, this time in oatmeal. (How fitting a yarn color name!)
Next up are Oatmeal & Honey. This is an 8/2 Brassard cotton, color name…you guessed it…honey. It adds a soft golden glow to the towels.
The last towel, Oatmeal & Cream, has an undyed 7/2 hemp-cotton weft. The yarn is 55% hemp, 45% organic cotton. An unusual size, it’s really not noticeably different from 8/2. Only one of these.
This is an 8-shaft draft. I originally got it from Handweaving.net, but it wasn’t quite symmetrical so I made some adjustments to both threading and treadling. Then I centered it for the width of my towels.
I’m going to post these on Facebook tomorrow. The last batch of towels I posted sold in a few days, so if you want one of these, contact me and we’ll arrange payment and shipping.
I also did a bit of dyeing. Back in February of 2019 I snow dyed some cotton leggings. But I got carried away with colors and they ended up like a cross between the 1960s and a clown.
I knew I wouldn’t wear them like that, so I overdyed, again a snow dye technique, with just red.
They were much better, but I only wore them a few times as they were still too flashy for me.
Yesterday I put them on and said, “Nope.” Even though I’m not going anywhere, I wasn’t happy with them. It was time to do something about that. Overdye again, this time in a dark color and immersion dyeing.
Yes. I can wear these out in public without attracting stares of disbelief.
I have another warp of towels on the loom now, but I’m going to take a few days off weaving to make face masks to donate.
Love the comfort at home towels. Have meant to ask if this is a crackle draft.
Thanks for the compliment, Alma E. I’d love to answer your question about whether it’s crackle, but unfortunately, being predominantly self-taught, I often don’t have a good handle on the appropriate names for things. So is it crackle? Beats me. I’d just call it a twill, but what do I know?
Good job with the leggings! I’ll bet the lemon loaf was really tasty!