This year I was way ahead of the game on getting towels woven and shipped to US and NZ destinations (more on that later in the post). I began playing around with a huck lace design – influenced by me seeing my sister-in-law using my woven towels as a bread cloth, which is perfectly acceptable – but not the ideal. A huck lace design has larger air gaps to release steam and has the bonus that the weave has a more structured, bumpy surface so still acts perfectly as a towel.
I found a very nice diamond pattern that would be fairly straightforward to weave and incorporate some green and red Christmas color stripes into a predominantly white towel. The warp is entirely white. As usual I chose 8/2 cotton for the yarn. Initial planning was for a sett of 20 epi, but after sampling I decided to re-sley at 24 epi. The huck pattern worked out way better at 24 after wet finishing.
As with previous runs of 30 or so towels the only choice is to us the sectional warp beam on Big Mac and fill enough bobbins to wind the 2 inch sections (48 as the sett was now 24 epi). The process went smoothly and with a different method for keeping tension on the yarn as it went through the counter I was way more consistent. The winding on to the beam was also pretty straight forward as now I have more room (in the studio for the first time doing Christmas towels) I could expand the distance between the bobbins and the tension box on the back beam of the loom. This kept the angle of the yarn coming off the bobbins less extreme which led to no snags or breaks. Once wound on I set up for threading back to front then tied-on.
The photo’s arrived a little out of order so starting from bottom left and going clockwise, winding bobbins, full bobbin rack, first yarn pulled, winding on through Tension box, and center; sections full.
Once I had the pattern repeat and color swaps worked out I could weave relatively quickly at about 45 minutes per towel. I didn’t trim the color join threads while weaving – leaving that for once they were cut off.
I averaged about 5 per day, up or down a bit, but pretty much as planned to give me plenty of time for finishing. Once off the loom the ends of the strip were sewn and the whole thing was wet finished then ironed. Each towel was then hemmed (machine sewing with finishing of the ends of the fold by hand).
As mentioned at the beginning this was the earliest I had ever had all the towels finished and way ahead of the normal shipping deadlines for NZ. Unfortunately it turns out that the US Postal Service is not sending packages to NZ (or 20 other countries) as they claim they cannot find services that are affordable or even available!! So I have a pack of towels all wrapped and ready to go, but no easy way to send them! The US post towels are gone, leaving only the local deliveries to go. It was great to get ahead of the normal November rush I typically have, and now knowing how easy it was to set up, weave, finish I may plan to fit the Christmas towels in even earlier next year.