Charleen's Fiberblog

First Towels

I cut my losses (literally) on the towel project and took it off. The warp was twisting more and more as I went on, leading into tension problems. The right fourth of the warp was loose and spongey, while the left fourth was extremely tight, and the middle was good. I have the Peggy Osterkamp's books and I'm going to try a shorter warp, and use the kite stick like she suggests.

I lost 3.5" in width which puts them a little too narrow for the exchange, which really isn't a problem, since I want to keep these first three. I made two green (8/2)with one treadling and one rust(8/2) with another. The warp was natural(6/2). I folded them over partially so that you could see the two patterns.

There were a couple of problems (but I'm still pretty proud of them). One side of the rust towel is about 1.5" longer than the other. But I figure it's because the warp was so loose on that side by the time I got to the rust. Another problem was the hem. I've read that people use sewing thread for the plain weave part. That seemed so drastically thinner that I just used the same 8/2 cotton for the plain weave - but even before I hemmed it you could see how the plain weave portion was wider (by about .5"). I tried to make sure the was very little pressure on the foot so that it wouldn't increase the width any more. I guess the next time I'll try the sewing thread.

Now for the next warp. This time I'm doing broken twill. I'd love to put a four thread plain weave on each side, but can't figure out how to do that so, looks like I'll be trying floating selvedges.

Posted by Charleen at August 22, 2002 07:28 PM