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.