Pattern from Handwoven May / June 2020
Tom Knisely
Huck Lace Napkins adapted to make towel
8/2 cotton warp/weft
578warp ends sett at 24 EPI. 2/ dent in a 12 dent reed
Hand stitched hems
MAFA2025-3964
MAFA2025-3945
188 Warp Ends; remember when following Dixon’s patterns that the draft does show the threading needed to “balance” the stripes.
MAFA2025-3902
I expanded the 8 shaft original draft to 24 shafts to balance my loom better. Results should be identical with the 8 shaft version.
MAFA2025-3901
Initial cut at 8-shaft Ms & Os.
Enjoyed the color play of the variegated warp against the dark weft.
Hand – hemmed, 398 ends.
MAFA2025-3797
Adding a quarter inch of plain weave at each selvage makes weaving this a lot easier. you don’t have to worry about floating selvages and oddness at the edge because of floats. Same goes for the plain weave at the ends. It’s much easier to hem a plain weave towel on the sewing machine. I have also found that adding some fray check in addition to zig-zagging the raw edge of the finished towel, makes it easier to hem the corners. Also, do not attempt to machine hem this towel unless your sewing machine has a heavy duty motor.
MAFA2023-037
452 ends
I put on a long warp and regretted it later; with the color changes it was slow weaving. I was unable to find an attractive way to carry the colors along a selvage.
I liked the use of two shafts to create a plain weave border at each selvage. It solved the issue of the long floats at deflected DW selvages.
MAFA2023-006
455 ends – 1 end 6/2 and 2 ends 20/2 per dent in 8 dent reed.
Warp: white thick, white thin
Weft: blue thick, white thin
Used Bluegrass Mills 6/2 cotton from Woolery for thick warp and weft and UKI 20/2 for thin warp and weft.
Used floating selvedges.
Several other patterns on same threading from her book that I plan to try next.
Also want to try using a colored thin weft.
Pattern shows much better after washing and pressing.
MAFA2019-051
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.
MAFA2019-035
I did notice that my warp drew in more for the point twill than the plain weave. Next time I will use a temple for that part. Warp color is white. Weft colors- -plain weave is pale yellow, point twill chevron is orange and point twill diamond pattern is red. The hem was hand-sewn prior to washing.