Another version of English tabby in blues and greys. This time my ribs are double threads instead of triple threads. The ribs are not quite as pronounced as in the previous towels, but still quite satisfying.
I played with different variations of weft stripes.
Towel 1: The weft is light grey, and shows off the warp stripes.
Towel 2: More or less following the colour order of the warp.
Towel 3: Adding in some dark grey stripes at the borders.
Towel 4: Repetitive sequence, dark blue, light grey.
These towels have been on my loom since September, and I just finished them this week. They are my interpretation of Temperature Towels, representing the month of August. The colours remind me of fruit sherbets, or Cabanas lined up on the beach and Summer beach towels.
The warp-wise stripes represent the daily high temperatures. 31 days in August.
The structure is a play on plain weave, called English Tabby, which I found in this book:
I love the little framed cells, and it adds a great texture and weight to the towels. This is most visible in the squares of solid colour, like the apricot square and the pale limette square here.
After I had the warp on the loom, I had to make some decisions on how I would arrange the weft colours.
For Towel #1 – I used only one colour in the weft, a medium green, for a solid striped effect.
Next, I wanted to put the same 31 coloured stripes in the weft, creating squares of colour on colour. But, because I wanted to make a towel that was longer than it is wide, I had to think about how I wanted to increase the length. I could either put the plaid in the centre and add a solid colour on each end, as I did in towel #2,
Or split the plaid and add a solid colour in the centre of the towel like I did in towel # 3.
For towel #4, I mostly worked with a stripe repeat of dark green, medium green, light green, with a couple of apricot stripes at each end.
And finally, for towel #5, I sandwiched a double stripe of colour between narrow stripes of fuchsia and another double stripe of colour between narrow stripes of pale Limette. So, the fuchsia stripes border one double colour then the pale limette stripes border another double colour. Notice how the colours look different depending on the colours that are next to it.
I love how the light bounces off of the triple ends and picks adding a visual as well as a tactile texture.
I’m quite chuffed at how these turned out. I would choose English Tabby again and would like to see the texture on a towel that was just one colour.
Just off the loom, these simple plain weave scarves.
Woven in plain weave to highlight the yarn, hand-dyed by Twisted Fae Fibreworks, in Kamloops, BC. Support your local venders when you can.
I bought one skein with short colour changes, and one “sock yarn set” which has long colour changes. The 100-gm skein of fingering weight yarn has 420 yards. I made a 6-yard warp to accommodate both scarves, which used up the large skein with short colour changes, as well as a portion of one of the sock skeins. Then, I used the other “sock” skein as weft for one of the scarves, for a great colour block effect, and the weft in the other scarf is Louet Gem in natural, for a soft pastel effect.
The colours are from Twisted Fae’s Pride Collection – Transgender. The scarves are going to someone special.
A reminder that every person you meet is a unique and complete human being with their own history and their own story. When you stop and take the time to listen to the stories, your world is all the richer for it. Be kind, stay inclusive, and move forward into 2025 with love in your heart.
This is a new to me yarn from Venne Cotton called Eco Jeans. It is a 12/2 cotton, made from recycled blue jeans and jeans clothing, spun together with used PET bottles. My research shows that PET plastic is the plastic, often used for water bottles, that is collected in our blue boxes and can be ground up and reused, over and over, and has a low carbon footprint with recycling. So, saving used clothing and plastic bottles from the landfill must have some positive, right?
The denim clothing is broken down into small fibres and combined with the broken-down PET to create a soft, linen-like thread that feels like old, well-loved blue jeans. It comes in a variety of blue-jeans colours from Dark Navy to Cloud.
I adapted the pattern called “Bricks and Mortar” available at GIST yarns, to make these scarves. Sett at 15 ends per inch using the colours Navy, Steel and Cloud. My warp was 11.75 inches in the reed, and 6 yds long, to make a sample and two scarves, each about 74 inches long on the loom. The pattern has a warp-float effect, and I treadled in a Huck style: tabby, float, tabby, float, tabby.
After taking the scarves off the loom, I twisted the fringe, and washed in a gentle wash in my machine, and air dried. Finished with a gentle steam iron.
Soft and drapey, and very wearable next to the skin, though I think I will try an even looser sett next time. Finished size of each scarf is 68.5 inches long x 10 inches wide. 306 gm of yarn used in total.
This year I have been weaving in turned twill. I love the look that is coming to life here, and the ability to expose colour changes while still weaving with one weft. So, I decided to make classic Christmas towels in red and green and white. The warp on the loom – red borders, and columns of white and light and dark green. A simple arrangement of traditional seasonal colours. Fat stripes, thin stripes.
A few days later, and I was rolling the towels off the loom! I love watching them puddle on the floor.
Six perfect towels. Towel #1 was woven almost Tromp-as-Writ. Red borders, White crossing white, green crossing green. Of course, I was using up all my stash, I used the last of my emerald green and Forrest green in the warp, so I used spruce green in the weft.
Towel #2 was woven using only red weft. As the twill is turned from 3/1 twill to 1/3 twill the white and green made their way to the surface.
Towels #3 and #4, woven with only green weft. Towel 3 uses Spruce green – reminiscent of evergreen trees. Towel 4 uses a brighter Limette green and narrow stripes of red. and makes me think of gaily wrapped presents under the tree.
Towel #5 is woven with natural weft and used a sequence of fat, medium and skinny twill turns.
And finally Towel #6 woven with bleached white weft, and repeating sequences of twill turns.
Stash-busting at its finest, and seasonal towels for gifting.
My last weaving was full of colour, with lots of colour changes and ends to weave in. I needed a palate changer, a little bit of simple weaving that I didn’t really need to think about. I looked at the stash on my shelf and pulled a dark blue, a light blue, and white to create a striped warp. These colours in the warp would provide a nice foundation that would “go with” several weft choices. I wanted to randomly use up bits and pieces, and not think too hard about what I was weaving as I cleared my mind for more complicated designs.
I happily made my warp, with a simple graphic and wound the colour blocks and started to dress my loom. I took a break and looked up, and my husband was watching Blue Jays baseball. I looked at the team uniforms, and then my warp, and . . . now that is all I see.
It confirms my belief that nothing really happens in a vacuum, and everything that is going on around us affects our choices.
I wove a long, long run of fabric, mostly plain weave with small inserts of twill. The weft is composed of the left-over thrums of past projects knotted together, creating a rustic feel with random colour changes. Thrums are the scraps of warp threads that are left over on the end of the loom, called loom waste, after the handwoven cloth has been cut off. These small scraps of yarn can be knotted together and used for weft in a new project. The knots become points of interest in the story. In Japanese weaving, this technique is called zanshi. In addition to the plain weave, I added small sections of twill to add to the story.
The thrums were all 2/8 cotton, and no real thought was given to colour changes. Just tie on the next piece and keep going. No ends to weave in.
I will probably sew this fabric into a set of tote bags. It feels good to recycle the small lengths of cotton thread to a useful purpose.
Following along with the Jane Stafford Online Guild, I have worked through Episode 5.2 Canvas Weave. I rearranged the draft to weave napkins instead of a sampler. Canvas weave is a fun and easy one shuttle weave. Jane gave us lots to think about, and different ways to create canvas lace. For the napkins, I choose two colours of 2.8 cotton: natural and flax. I put the canvas lace in the centre, and smaller amounts of canvas towards the outer edges, creating a nine-patch square when woven as drawn in. Throughout the episode, Jane Stafford gave us many variations, so we went beyond the simple Tromp-as-writ. I wove 14 napkins in total. Here are my four favourites.
More fun with turned twill, this time with a song. I have been thinking about how to turn music into weaving for a while now, and so I took the plunge. I started with a simple song, in this case “Row, row, row your boat”.
From this, I made a profile draft based on the relative value of the notes. So, an eighth-note has a value of 1, a quarter-note has a value of 2, a dotted quarter-note has a value of 3, a half-note has a value of 4, and a dotted half note has a value of 6. Using this information, I created the profile draft shown below. I looked at the first line of the song. The first note is a dotted quarter note, with a value of 3, so I put 3 squares on the bottom line. The second note also has a value of 3, this went on the second line. The third note has a value of 2, and back to the bottom line. I worked my way through the first line, Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Then I mirrored the draft back to the beginning of the line.
I let each square of the profile draft become one unit of turned twill. The squares on the bottom row were threaded 1,2,3,4 for each black square and the black squares on the top row were threaded as 5,6,7,8 for each square. I used 2/8 Tencel in the colour order given. The multi-blue was a beautiful skein of Tencel/bamboo, hand dyed by Teresa Ruch that I had been hoarding for some time.
I wove the first scarf in Periwinkle Tencel, using the relative value of the notes of the second line, “Merrily, merrily, merrily ,merrily, life is but a dream”, again mirrored, to create the border design.
For the second scarf, I switched to a light olive green and used a repetitive sequence for the turned twill design. this scarf has an iridescent glow, and I love the way the colours look different on each side.
The scarves just sing along with the music.
These towels are modelled after those shown in Jane Stafford Online Guild, Season 5, Episode 1, turned twill. I changed the colour order, making cherry the largest colour. Then I have stripes of yellow, grey, apricot separated by black to complete the asymmetrical warp. I loved watching the colours advance, and recede, and even disappear through the manipulation of turned twill. Jane’s explanations and examples cleared up any doubts and confusion I had about using turned twill.
Weaving these towels became a journey of joy and exploration.
A change in weft colour from magenta in one towel to cherry in the next, gives a different tone to the towel.
Alternating stripes, changing the turn of the twill adds dimension. Here the grey stripe in the first towel looks almost blue against the orange. And in the narrow strips of apricot and cherry, the shift moves from weft-faced to warp-faced twill.
Dots and dashes are achievable as well.
And weaving with these colours and adding in more made these towels a joy to weave, because everything looked so different from what I thought I was going to see. Hard to believe they all came from the same warp. Colour is the star of these towels, but turned twill is a strong supporting cast.
I continue my journey of finding ways to communicate through the woven cloth. These scarves have what looks like random stripes, but a message is hidden within.
The stripes form letters, which form words of love. I turned to an early career in computer coding and remembered binary codes which use zeros and ones to create a key.
It was simple enough to let each “zero” be a dark thread and each “one” be a light thread.
I coded the message: “Love You Forever” and mapped out the warp placement.
I threaded this as a broken twill, eight threads per letter, and changed the direction of the twill for each new letter. I wove one scarf with dark yarn, Harrisville Shetland Midnight, and one with light yarn, Harrisville Shetland Cornflower. 10 ends per inch, 10 picks per inch. The Harrisville Shetland bloomed on washing and here we have two delightful scarves woven with love.
 | marybentleyweaver on English Tabby Take 2 |
 | Vicki on English Tabby Take 2 |
 | Steve Baker on Summer Towels in the Wint… |
 | dianeore on Summer Towels in the Wint… |
 | spinweaverbarbara on Summer Towels in the Wint… |
Pieces of a life with thread and mixed media
at home with Lara's wheels, spindles, looms & dye pots
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