Designing By The Seat Of My Pants

As I typed the title of this blog, I thought, hmmmmm, where does that saying come from?  Well, Mr. Goggle tells me that to ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ is a saying from the early days of aviation when pilots flew by their judgment rather than by instruments which had yet to be invented.

This saying really epitomizes my trial and error style of creating these tea towels.....here’s how the story progressed.

I wanted to use 1/8 tow linen, just because it’s pretty and I had enough to make nice colour block tea towels unlike any I had woven before.  My goal was pink on one side, lilac on the other separated by green outlined in purple.  The colours were chosen based on the tow linen I had.  I had no idea of the weft at this point.  Like I said, seat of my pants.

I planned to use the tow linen as the warp because it can be difficult to make nice selvedges with some types of linen and I thought to make my life easier by using some kind of cotton as the weft.

My original idea was to pull a warp of about 40 percent pink and 40 percent lilac with 10 percent other for the break in a vaguely St. George’s Cross pattern.

When I started to pull the tow linen and found that it was super fuzzy, way fuzzier than I expected and I knew immediately that it would have potential bridging problems.  There is nothing worse that a warp that will not lift due to fuzz sticking together; so out it came.  I would swap the cotton to the warp and use the linen as weft, changing on the fly!

Searching the stash I found 2/16 unmercerized cotton in similar colours, some a little darker and a wee bit different tones, but close enough and it looked like I had enough at first glance. 

I began pulling the cotton warp and ran out of 2/16 pink cotton at 172 ends......I was looking to have around the 240 mark.  So back to the computer and a rejig of the draft. 

My initial thought was to just increase the number of lilac ends that I needed and so I created this draft where the cross is moved off centre and the whole shebang was more asymmetrical but still pretty close to my plan and pretty nice looking.

Back to the warping board with the lilac cotton and surprise, surprise...I ran out of lilac at 272 ends, exactly 100 ends more than the pink cotton, but far short of what I needed at 308 ends. So another iteration which increases the green and still looks good, but not perfect.

Gotta love PCW and the ease of changing a draft!  I started to increase the amount of green in the centre cross and to fiddle with the purple breaks and this is my final draft and I’m pretty happy with it. I decided to move a lilac stripe into the green and it now looks vaguely plaid; and still pretty.

I suppose now would be a good time to plan just how I’m going to weave it.  The warp is 613 ends and set at 28-30 ends per inch gives me a width of between 20-21 inches.  I’m using a metric reed that is 14-15 dent and I will be setting 2 per dent; but I plan to weave the tea towel to 36 inches.   Drat! More math and more ‘designing by the seat of my pants’!

Navy and Blue Drall Tea Towels

The beginning of the year is always tea towel time for us.  The newest tea towel warp is a lovely shade of blue with six stripes of turquoise that have a pin stripe of peach.

The pattern is an eight shaft drall and the weft is navy blue.  Drall is a Swedish term for turned twill.  And turned twill means that areas of the draft are 1/3 twill and other areas are 3/1.  In this case the stripes are 3/1 twill and the rest is 1/3 twill.  The stripes almost have a braided appearance and the large areas are lovely blue dots speckled on a navy background. 

I like to have a border of stripes on each towel and in with this draft when I turned the twill in the treadling, like magic, the blue warp appears as the stripes.  It is a really nice way of making a border for the tea towels without changing the weft.

I like to make a unique border pattern for each tea towel so I write down the pattern but I also take a picture to make sure that I have a backup just in case.  This is towel two.

After two towels I decided to try different weft colours, white and a light grey.  But I didn’t like either of them so back to the navy I went.

This is towel three and I seemed to have not taken a picture of towel four.

I like to machine wash and dry the tea towels and then steam press before turning up the hem.  I use a metal ruler to measure the turned up hem, the one drawback to this is that the metal ruler does get really,really hot!

Then the tea towels are hand hemmed before getting a second and final steam press.  Here are the final pictures of the tea towels.  For Sale.

For Sale.

Final Garden Shot is Puschkinia or Russian Snowdrops....after the slug attack only a few survived!

Purple Striped Tea Towels

In the beginning of the year we are always drawn to tea towels.  This year I wanted to do lively coloured and thick stripes.  I was really drawn to the purples and a lovely lime green to highlight the colours.

I found a charming pattern on Handweaving.net that forms little boxes.  The pattern is a 3/1 turned twill also known as a drall.

The stripes are an inch wide and there are three boxes per stripe which makes them look even wider.  The weft for the tea towels is a lovely shade of blue from Brassards called Denim.

I put on 7 yards of warp for 6 tea towels 36 inches long.  At the end of the warp I had 26 inches left, so minus 12 inches for loom waste, I had 14 inches left over.

I came up with a great idea, bookmarks!  I tried out a couple of colours of 2/8 cotton but they were matte and boring.

So I tried some 2/8 Tencel in black and two navies, they had shine and were exciting.  So I had found my weft for the bookmarks.

I decided to only use some of the stripes.  And here is where I made the mistake; I decided to cut out the warp stripes that I wasn’t going to use.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  The tension on the warp went wild and I had to finish cutting the entire warp off.  Here is the chained off warp looking sad, maybe I will do some temari balls with it.

Here are the finished tea towels.  They look fresh and cheerful.  They remind me of the first spring flowers, crocuses.  For Sale.

One thing about the tea towels is that the lime green stripe doesn’t look green anymore.  The purple stripes and navy weft has pulled the green colour from the stripe and now it looks yellow.  I still think that they look great, but not quite what I had intended.

Final Garden Shot is Bleeding Heart.  I wish I had a crocus picture but a bunny dug the bulbs up and ate them!