It’s January, so it must be tea towels; that seems to be our slogan here at Dust Bunnies. As I was trying to figure out what tea towel pattern I wanted to do, I got a commission for 4 tea towels. The colours are navy blue and yellow. In the picture you can see that the tops of the tubes have been coloured. When we get a new order of 2/8 cotton, we colour the tubes so that we can keep the different dye lots separated. The bottom tube of navy is a slightly different colour and in the dark days of winter it could have been hard to notice when pulling the warp, so I'm glad I caught it.
The pattern for the tea towels is a point twill on 12 shafts, the pattern makes lovely shapes in the heddles. It is one that we’ve done before in 2018 and 2020.
So far the hardest part of these tea towels is the actual weaving, this is the first attempt and I didn’t beat the weft hard enough and the left edge is a mouse nibbled mess; so I pulled out the 5 inches that I have woven and began again.
The second attempt is much better. I’m having to do a double beat to pack the weft in nicely and the pattern is showing up much crisper. I also found that my hanging selvages had uneven weights, I had 7 pennies on the left and 10 pennies on the right and when I added the three extra pennies to the left my mouse nibbled edge magically disappeared. Who knew it made such a difference?
I’ve finished one towel and I’m starting on the second out of the four yellow tea towels. I’ve put on enough warp for 6 towels and I’m already thinking about what colours can I use for the last two towels!
We’ve had a very cold spell and then a big dump of snow so the garden is looking a little beat up. There are no promising hints of green shoots showing today but by next week there could be as we are well above freezing. Still, I'm longing for days when the sky isn't dull grey and fog isn't our constant companion.
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