Taco Tea Towel Wrap Up

I finally have the Taco Tea Towels off the loom and washed and dried,  and I am really, really happy with them.

The first two tea towels were woven with wefts of framboise and orange brulee and I really liked them both.   You can see them here.

I decided not to weave any two tea towels the same, so for my third tea towel I chose cerise (cherry) for the weft.  This tea towel is by far the hottest and brightest of the lot.  It is much prettier than the photo because no matter where I put it, the sun mars the true colour.

Tea towel number four was woven in honey yellow and I love the soft glow of this towel.  Because I used honey for one of the warp stripes too, the overall effect is much calmer than the others.

At this point I decided that I was going to change it up and do colour blocks.  For this tea towel I decided to go for about 3 inch blocks of honey and framboise.  I wove a 4 inch block to start and at the end so that I would have 1 inch to fold under for the hem.  This ensured that all the blocks on the ‘right’ side of the tea towel are all the same length.  I really like this tea towel but I must admit that all the stopping and starting whilst changing colours really slowed me down.

For the final tea towel I chose to continue weaving in blocks, but made each block 4 inches in width and wove 5 inch starting blocks.  By doing this I went from 12 blocks to 10 blocks.  This tea towel was woven in blocks of honey and orange brulee.

I really departed from my usual cool colours with this batch of tea towels, but now that the colour barrier has been crossed, I have a feeling more of the ‘warm’ colours are in my future!

As I mentions some time ago we painted our house this spring and went from a soft green house to a soft soft grey.  Well, against the new grey our well weathered teak two seater placed on the side passage way looked really sad.  So, we threw caution to the wind and painted it purple.....yup....purple! 

The old cushions were brown tropic themed and really looked weird with the purple, so they got a make over too and we chose to go bold and cheerful and I love it!  Gotta say, making covers for square cushions was a weebit of a challenge, but hopefully no one will inspect my corners!

The garden shot for the week is Clematis ‘Jackmanii’ peeking out from behind the much more aggressive grapes on the pergola in the back garden.

Everything but Weaving

Etsy has a new feature; videos.  I was part of the prototype group, so I got to try it out last month and now it is available to everyone on Etsy.  All of our scarves in the Etsy shop have videos, so, if you want to, go have a look.  It is really surprizing how long it took to do short 15 second videos for each of the scarves, but I think that they are going to be worth it.  It's lovely to see them outside in natural light to get a better idea of their colour and this is especially true for green scarves.  This example is one of my favorites because of the little bird in the background.

I have also been doing product photos for the new sets of tea towels and I have been trying out some different looks for the tea towels.  I am going to redo some photos for the older tea towels because I like using the large wooden bowl instead of the yellow bowl or the silver colander.  I like to have a cohesive look to the shop so some new photos are in order.

I also found that I liked to do a messy stack of the whole set of the tea towels instead of the stacking the in a fan shape.  The colours are Apple Blossom Pink, Pink Lilac, Lavender and Quince Blossom.  So the first two colours of the Spring Flowers cottolin tea towels are up and in the next couple of days the other two colours will be up.  Apple Blossom Pink and Lavender.

We are finally having some summer weather so every chance I get I’m outside.  Here are some garden pictures that I took today.

The Humming bird is hanging out in the Crocosmia 'Lucifer' (Montbretia).

We put down straw in the veg patch to keep the vegetables clean and mulched.  In this photo we have beans, cucumbers, cantaloup, zucchini, cutting celery, shiso leaves in pots, grapes and tomatillos, whew a lot is such a small space!   It has been so cold that nothing is as far along as it should be for this time of year.

This is the new extended area in the back perennial garden that I showed you earlier in the spring.  It always surprises me how fast the garden goes from ‘the plants are too small’ to ‘everything is getting too big’!

Taco Tea Towels

During 2011, I took part in a tea towel exchange and the results were so much fun. One of the tea towels I received was this symphony in warm colours.

This tea towel became my ‘go to’ cloth to wrap up warm corn tortillas on our weekly Mexican Monday, so it is associated with many, many happy memories. Now, after nine years of use wrapping up the hot off the grill tortillas, as well as the obligatory dish drying, it's a tad faded but still in wonderful condition, all soft and absorbent.  Just goes to show that investing in a handmade tea towel is well worth it!

The colours I chose for my Taco Tea Towels are from M. Brassard et fils in Quebec; Orange Fonce, Honey, Brick, Mauve and Cerise.  All are in 2/8 unmercerized cotton, which is the perfect tea towel yarn in my opinion.

The pattern I decided upon is the same pattern I used on my very first project on my Louet Spring Loom in 2008.  It is a 12 shaft pattern that has sections of 2/2 twill, basketweave and plaited twill.  I put on a warp 7 yards long to make 6 tea towels each 36 inches long.   Hmmm, when will I ever go metric....Canada went metric in 1970 and I use metrics for everything except weaving, go figure!

The weft on the first tea towel is Framboise ~ another Canadian foible in that I see framboise, I write framboise but my mind translates it to raspberry right away....ahh the joys of bilingualism.  This weft really highlights the orange plaited twill  and the 2/2 twill sections.

The weft on the second tea towel is Orange Brulee, or burnt orange, and in this tea towel the brick plaited twill sections are the star.  You can really pick up the basket weave in the mauve stripes too.

The garden shot this week is a new addition to my growing love of cone flowers in my perennial borders.  This one is Echinacea purpurea ‘Green Twister’ and what a beauty.