Eleven Shaft Tea Towels Wrap Up

My eleven shaft tea towels are done, done, done and it was a lovely project overall.

One of the neat things that happened while I was doing some random treadling between the tea towels is that these lovely hearts magically appeared.  This is just a partial pattern treadling and I know I’ll go back to it later and see if I can make it work as a repeating pattern.

The take up on this pattern was more than I expected and I ended up weaving right to the very end of the warp.  I really don’t like to go this close to the heddles because the shed was sooooo tight.  This is also a pretty good shot of the colourful hair clips that I use to hold the heddles that I’m not using together.  Everytime I sit down to thread a new warp I’m delighted by the Easter colours and of  course the bunny ears help!

Here are my tea towels off the loom, before wet finishing.  I love this shot.

I had a hard time deciding which side would be the ‘right’ side, frankly both are lovely.

These are the four different wefts that I chose for my Spring Tea Towels.

The front and back sides of each of the duplicate coloured wefts.

I placed an order with Maurice Brassard et fils in Quebec for more 2/8 cotton and this lovely box of possibilites arrived in just four days.

One of the things I do right away is take a sharpie to each tube of cotton and mark colour them in.  I choose a different colour each time.  This not only helps me with using up my stock by age, but really helps with keeping the dye lots seperate.

This shot is a bit blurry, but you can still clearly tell that they are the same colour, from the same supplier but differing dye lots.  I have been caught out more than once, I’m sorry to say, with a streak in my web because I got the dye lots mixed up.  Surprisingly this has also happened with white cotton, not only with the dyed cotton; I guess there are differences in the bleaching process too.

At this point I update my yarn binder and I can’t say enough about what a good idea this is.  I have written blogs about making this binder in the past and it is my best organizational tool. (Focusing on Fibres March 2009 and Confessions of a Compulsive Organizer December 2019); I would be lost without it.

Our Garden is really lovely right now and the perennial borders are at their best. This is a really lovely shot of Penstemon hybrid ‘Garnet’ commonly called Beard Tongue.  What a weird name for a truly spectacular summer perennial.  The hummingbirds and bummble bees love it.