I used 422 ends including floating selvages. The warp is Chocolate Brown by Spartan Dyers from Cotton Clouds. The weft is turquoise by Maurice Brassard from The Woolery.
My draft is #355 in Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of Eight-Shaft Patterns. This is a plaited twill pattern.
I created this draft as a sketch and then modified it as I wove. I had intended to warp it in three sections: ABA. Somehow, my B section became 2 sections when I inadvertently went from beige, white, beige to white, beige, white in my threading.
I love my “happy accidents,” but they are difficult to share with others.
I used several colors of Bluegrass Mills’ 6/2 unmercerized cotton yarn for my towel.
Plain weave for turned hem, sewn by hand.
I love this weave, and have used it several times for towels. I varied the stripes in warp and weft for more visual interest.
I like towels as usable samples of structures that are new to me because even a failure will probably still dry dishes. Diversified Plain Weave (using Madelyn Van der Hoogt’s “new DPW threading and treadling” see Weaver’s Summer 1997) is a really fun structure I wanted to play with. It has a simple 3 thread unit in both warp and weft that lends itself to using block designs.
A post on Facebook by Robyn Spady led me to a document on handweaving.net – Block Drafts from Heinrich Leisy’s Pattern Book – where I found a 4 block profile draft that appealed to me. I used Fibreworks to interpret it as a DPW draft. The warp is 1 thread thick (4/8 cotton) and 2 threads thin (2/16 cotton) repeated across. I wound the 3 threads at once to make chains that I then handpainted using MX dyes in shades of green for the main warp and navy for accent stripes. I did 5 towels and a large sample on the warp, playing with different weft colours for each one. The weft sequence is 2 shots 2/16 on plain weave treadles followed by one shot of 4/8 on a pattern treadle. My Tempo Treadle was indispensable for keeping my place in the very long treadling sequence.
The neatest thing about this structure is the colour effect. There is very little blending of warp and pattern weft colours so choices that would otherwise get muddled in a weave structure like plain weave (e.g. red pattern on the green background) actually work quite well. The thin threads are thin enough that they don’t seriously skew the background colour, either, though next time I might try a thin weft in a colour and value close to the warp colours to make it disappear even more and I might try an even finer thin weft (2/20 or 2/30). Note that the first towel looked sleazy on the loom so I cut it off and washed it to check. It shrank quite a bit in both length and width and filled in nicely with a beautiful hand.
I really enjoyed weaving this towel and the fabric that was produced. As I used a very different color way than suggested, my towel looks not a lot like the gingham checks in the pattern. I hope whoever receives this towel enjoys it for many years.
I learned how to choose 2 block textures for a 4 shaft loom. This was woven on a warp from MAFA 2017 Rosalie Neilson’s class “Color & Design in Huck Lace Towels”
I enjoyed weaving Huck for the first time, and enjoyed learning about motif, design, & texture in the class.
