Striped Cottolin Tea Towels

I put on enough warp for four tea towels in stripes of lime, pink, orange, periwinkle, purple and turquoise 2/22 cottolin, a real Unicorn Party!

The weft choice for the first two tea towels was an easy pick, purple.  The purple is 2/8 cotton and it is a very close match to the purple cottolin that I used to separate the stripes.

As the warp is striped I didn’t add a plaid border to the tea towels, the stripes are plenty enough!  The weaving went very quickly and I soon had two tea towels wrapped around the cloth beam.

I wasn’t sure what colour I was going to do the last two tea towels, so I got out the bins full of 2/8 cotton and separated out all the possibilities.   I was hoping that one of the greens would work; but I think that the winner is going to come from the blue family.

I auditioned royal blue, navy blue, sage green and a dark aubergine purple.  The winner was definitely the royal blue.

The royal blue is such a pretty colour and it works really well with all the colours in the stripes.  It actually makes many of the colours seem more fresh.

The tea towels are off the loom and ready to be washed but it’s too hot here to run the drier and steam press so they are going to have to wait until it is cooler to be finished. 

The beginning of June was 10 degrees colder than normal but now two weeks later we are having a record breaking heat wave; the temperatures are 10 to 20 degrees warmer than usual.  We’ll probably hit 40 C today and with the high humidity, it feels so much hotter!

The garden seems to be coping with the heat for the most part; the purple flowers are Knautia macedonica 'Thunder and Lightning', Gaillardia x grandiflora 'Arizona Sun' is the sunny face in the foreground, Salvia greggii 'Amethyst Lips' and Nicotiana alta 'Lime Green' round out the rota.