New Kitchen Towels, Some Assembly Required

Who doesn't want four-color echo kitchen towels? First, there is inpiration. Looking at the lovely images in Marian Stubenitsky's book, Weaving Echo and Iris, and getting detailed information from Alice Schlein's detailed posts were enough to send me to the drawing board. But floats of 33 made me realize that developing a workable draft took, well, work. And every pretty picture did not have an associated draft that I could find. So I experimented on my own, and then wisely spent a weekend in January of 2019 in Chico, California at AVL with Janie Taylor for a hands on workshop. What a teacher! We developed hundreds of drafts over those few days. At least one should work.

The warp color decision seemed to take center stage. This warp has 4 colors, one single end of each color in the same order throughout the entire warp. I used 8/2 unmercerized cotton in grey, red, yellow and blue. 576 ends total, 24 inches in the reed with 24 ends per inch. I started with a green weft. So green represented 50% of the total color, and the others, 12.5% each. So just like Sunday comics, with dots of 3 colors optically blended to simulate more variation, the warp colors would optically blend and alter the green to the yellow or teal or dull it down with contrasting red or grey. When I ran out of green, I tried other colors as well. 

When washed, the width shrunk to 20" which I used lengthwise. Next time, I'll have a starting width of 20" shrinking to 16" and have a more traditional size. But I never sample; I figure they're dish towels and will get plenty of use and abuse!

Draft with tie up and treadling on a 16 harness compudobby. 

Turns out all the time agonizing about warp colors was largely wasted. They serve to modify the weft, which is the main event in this balanced weave. Network twill structure.

View of the laptop which feeds line by line information to the loom for the next lift. This pattern had a repeat of 192. Try memorizing that with traditional treadles!

Various wefts as I serially ran out of a color. Small cones are frustrating. I do own an iron but it doesn't show here. Now to hem and dry the dishes.