More Colours in Twill

The last few towels flew off the loom, and I pretty much flew by the seat of my pants in deciding what colour combinations to use.

For the fifth towel, I went with one in kelly green and magenta, which is definitely one of my favourites of the whole bunch.  It's really bright and I like how the colours work together.

With the sixth towel, I realized that I was running out of towels to weave, and I wanted to get back to orange, since I had really liked the previous orange one a lot.  Since I had done it with magenta already (and didn't want to do anything too tonally similar like the dark red) I matched it up with the dark purple.  I like this one a lot too.

The other light colour I'd only used once was yellow, and while I toyed with using it against the kelly green or against the orange, I was afraid that they just wouldn't have enough contrast to be visually interesting.  I went with magenta instead, since both of my previous magenta towels turned out so pretty.  In the end, I think it's a bit too similar to the yellow/red combo (until you see them next to each other they look pretty close) but je ne regrette rien.

I had to get them off the loom quickly because I have a time-sensitive project to weave - Handwoven magazine is taking submissions for designs for a new e-book and I wanted to weave up a sample to submit it - but once that is all done, I will hem and wash and iron these towels and show them off as a set.

Can't Stop Won't Stop

After doing the last colourful set of towels, I really wanted to do another set in some different colours, and keep playing with the concept.  I thought it would be fun to do a set in Mardi Gras colours (purple, green, and gold) so chose a couple of shades of each and used a weaving program on the computer to come up with a point twill stripe design that I liked.  In the end, I also added a deep red to help balance out the darks and lights in the design.

Once I had the green summer and winter towels off the loom, I couldn't wait to get started on this warp, since it's so colourful and fun (and the weaving is comparatively mindless.)

My initial plan was to do seven towels in total, with each of the first three towels in one of the three colour groups.  I started with one in Kelly Green and Pistachio.  You can see it at the bottom of the photo.  The two colours are both relatively light, and there wasn't a lot of contrast between the stripes.  It made an overall wash of green over the colours of the whole warp, which I didn't hate, but it wasn't what I was imagining.  I decided to nix my initial plan to follow up with a purple/magenta striped towel and an orange/yellow towel.  I wanted more contrast between the stripes to make the towels more visually interesting.

With that in mind, I did the second towel in orange and magenta stripes.  This one had a lot of visual pop and I was really happy with how it turned out.  The colours have a good amount of contrast and they give the warp colours a lot of variation.  I like how the twill diamonds alternate between columns when the weft stripes alternate between dark/light.  In the green towel, they only show up distinctly in the dark warp stripes, since the greens are both so light.

For the third towel, I stayed with high contrast and did a towel with stripes in Pistachio green and a deep Purple.  Again, I think the contrast makes it much better and I like the green better here.

I went with yellow and deep red stripes for the fourth towel.  It is only subtly different than the previous one, but definitely still pleasing to the eye.

That passes the halfway point for the towels, since there should be a total of seven.  I have a couple of colour combinations planned for the last ones, but to be honest, I'm actually reconsidering doing the yellow/orange combo... and even the purple/magenta...  what do you think?

Celebratory Towels

So it's just another photo-heavy post to show off the completed, washed & dried & ironed towels, because I'm so delighted with how they look, both individually and as a set.

More Twill Towels

For the fourth towel, I changed to a different set of weft colours.  This one had less contrast again, with a blue and black weft.  What a change in tone from the previous three towels!  All the colours are still there, but much more muted.

Then I brought in the brightest colour of them all, the light green, and made the fifth towel with all the contrast, in black and green.

Then I did the last one in green and blue, a little less contrast and tonally more similar.

But wait!  I finished the sixth and final towel only to realize I had tons of warp left on the loom.  When I initially planned out the pattern, I thought the magazine allowed for an unnecessarily long warp, and upon getting to this point in the weaving, I realized that I easily had room for another towel.  My first thought was to use the last of each colour to do a really variegated stripey weft, but I was sort of done with swapping shuttles and winding bobbins.  I couldn't bear to waste such a pretty warp, though, all ready to go.  I decided I'd use some spare 10/2 cotton I had, in white, without any stripes at all.  This made something completely different and a bit unexpected and I really really like it.  The colours are softened a bit, and the blocks look like changing transparencies of glass over the stripes of colours.

Now to finish them up!

A Set of Twill Towels

I don't know if it's just because of the change in the weather, but I got a real case of startitis this week, and began a second pair of socks for gifting, an out-of-the-blue artsy knitting concept, and I really have my eye on a new slouchy hat for fall... maybe some fingerless mitts... not to mention this baby from the new BrooklynTweed collection.

But before I get to any of that, I should catch you up on my weaving.  I did get the skully napkins off the loom (seemed like they took forever) but I haven't gotten to hemming and finishing them yet.  Instead, I got really distracted with these babies, a set of dishtowels using a bit of colour and an irregular twill weave to add interest.

There are six colours in the warp, and I chose two of those for the weft of each towel.

The first towel had a red and pink weft.  The two colours didn't have much contrast, but it still looks quite nice:

Then came a towel with an orange and red weft:

Then one with a pink and orange weft.  It looks quite similar to the last one, again since there isn't much difference between the red and pink, but there is still a different tone to it:

That last shot shows the design most clearly, since it's nice and close.  There are warp stripes in six colours, weft stripes in two, and the overall pattern is an alternating 3:1 and 1:3 twill.  The places where the twill changes is offset from the colour stripe changes, which makes the whole thing much more interesting and gives more colours to the eye.  I can't wait to see how much better they all look, once they're washed and ironed.

Next time I'll show you the other weft combinations!

Experiment in Stripes

Another scrappy scarf, this time using the Irelande and Chocolate and Robin's Egg blue from previous scarves, and some Chartreuse Patons Wool with a bit of Peace Fleece in Kamchatka Sea Moss.

I did a warp stripe, but it's almost lost in the twill - I swear the weft was open enough when I was weaving it!  You can see the angle of the twill is pretty much 45 degrees, so I'm not sure why the vertical stripe is so subtle.

What shows up fairly well is the sort of fade I did to change from blue to chartreuse and back again.  I think it really turned out, and makes a cooler transition than just a clean break from one colour to another.

Happy holidays to one and all - I'll be out of town and away from my loom, so the last scarf will have to wait until next weekend!

Name Draft Towels

I love weaving for many reasons, but one of the cool things about it is that it's pretty easy for even a beginner to make up original designs and play around to make something new and interesting.

One fun way for a weaver to personalize a design is something called a name draft.  You can use a name or phrase of some sort and assign blocks to each letter (i.e. some of the letters of the alphabet will end up a blue block, some will end up a white block in this example.)  Then when you repeat the letter blocks across the width and length of the piece, it will hopefully make a pleasing design.

The story for these particular towels starts with a friend of mine that I've known for a couple of decades (yes, I'm that old.)  When I reconnected with him two months ago, he was in a real transition period in his life, just settling into a new place and starting anew.  I thought it might be a nice idea to make him a little housewarming gift, and wrote up a draft for these towels.  It took a while to get the appropriate yarn in the mail, but once I did, I started them right away.  A bit of a hiatus while I was away in Jasper, and while I was working on more time-sensitive stuff, meant that they didn't get finished as quickly as they could have.  I had them off the loom a few days ago, and hand sewed the hems down.  Tonight I finally managed to get them washed and ironed and photographed so they're ready to go.  By the time he gets them, he'll be well-settled into his new place, but hopefully he'll like them, nevertheless.

The towels are woven from soft and strong Aurora Earth, an unmercerized cotton from Cotton Clouds, and I really enjoyed weaving with it.  It's not shiny and smooth like a mercerized cotton would be, but it's really tough, and the colours are saturated.  I'm pretty pleased with the end result, and I'm glad to have a bit of leftover yarn, so I can use these colours to play again.

The New Weaving Project

I finally got my loom Miss Bennet warped for my new weaving project, and did some sampling yesterday to make sure it was going to work out all right.  All was well, so I did the hem (the blue stripe at the bottom) and then started the weaving proper today.

It's a set of dishtowels, three in total.  A nice deep royal blue for the warp, and the weft will be a different colour for each of the three.  This one might look fairly white in the photo, but it's actually a baby blue.

So far it's going pretty well - I have the beat figured out so it's turning out nice and square, and the pattern is showing up just as I'd hoped.  One repeat done, with six repeats per towel.  A good beginning, with a long and enjoyable weaving road ahead.

Using the Leftovers - Purples/Grey

And so my beautiful loom, Miss Bennet, is naked again.  (Don't look!  She's shy.)  The last of this year's series of Kindergarten Scarves is finished, washed and dried and ready to go.

For this one, I did another plaid in 2/2 twill - this time I didn't mirror the colour sequence, but rather repeated it twice across the width of the scarf.  Then I wove the same repeat for the length.  Because I had more of the grey and lavender (Montmartre) left over, I doubled the width of those stripes in comparison to the other four, which worked out perfectly to balance the light shades and dark shades.  My only regret is the lack of symmetry, i.e. not having one more column up one side to make it five colour blocks wide instead of four.  That would satisfy my aesthetic side a bit better.

The funny thing is that of this year's scarves, the ones that were unplanned were the ones I got the best feedback on.  Maybe next year I'll just skip the planning and do a series of assorted plaids.

I present to you, the Kindergarten Scarves, 2012 series:

Using the Leftovers - Blues/Greens

Having made so many scarves in this series, I had quite a bit of yarn left over, and split it up into two piles: blues/greens and purples/grey.  I had plenty of each left to make a final couple of scarves.

For this one, I arrayed the blues and greens in a progression of colour, mirroring it at the center.  Then I wove it following the same progression.  It made for a nice plaid and I really think it's my favourite of this year's scarves.  Maybe it's just because I picked all these colours in the first place and I think they're all so pretty...

Kindergarten Scarf Qq

I can't think of anything clever that Q might stand for, but here is the next scarf, nevertheless.

Another crazy design in crazy colours -- as someone with no kids, this is the sort of thing I believe they like -- this one is in Garnet Heather for the warp (a sort of plummy wine purple) with Citron for the weft (a glorious bright apple green.)

You're looking at front and back, there.  Not a lot of difference between them, but some of you might pick it up.  I had a challenge in making the diamonds even - some of them are a bit stretched out on one side because I wasn't totally consistent with my weaving.

That's the last of the scarves in original colours.  I am doing two more using up all the leftovers: one in blues/greens and one in purples.  I've started the first one, and I think it might be the nicest, yet.

P is for Purple

Yesterday, as my series of Kindergarten Scarves starts to near the end, I decided to go with something a little fancier and more complicated than most of the ones I've done, so far.  I had set aside two shades of purple for this design, an M&W threading for a 2/2 twill.  I was worried that a lot of the detail would be lost in the fluffy wool, but it actually turned out pretty nice, after washing and drying.  It will be nice for a kid with an eye for detail.

The day before yesterday I did the last of the hopsack scarves - this one was a 3:1 hopsack, which made a design of little magenta squares on one side of the scarf, and little teal squares on the other side.  The squares fluffed up quite a bit and it seems like a thicker scarf than the others, which might just be an illusion.  I like that the two layers are coordinated but different.

N is for Navy

It might look more black than navy, but trust me on this one - that's a grey and navy 4-shaft houndstooth  you're looking at.  I figured that not all kids are playful and colourful and looking for wacky scarves - some are more conservative, like future PC party members (or Young Republicans, for our neighbours in the south.)  This scarf will match perfectly with a dressy grey or navy suit that any kid might aspire to wearing.

Not Quite a Burberry Scarf

When I first put these leftover shades together for a scarf, I thought of it as just a bunch of autumn tones.  After weaving a bit, they started to remind me of a Burberry Scarf, if only the colours were a bit different (and of course the plaid was more regular.)

I started this one out with a warp using a 6:2:6:10:4 repeat.  With only four colours, this means that it would make an irregular-looking pattern.  Once I started weaving, using the same repeat, I soon realized that I wouldn't have enough of most of the colours to make the scarf long enough.  I had lots of the natural, though, so I started to incorporate longer sections of natural within a random design.  You can see the transition between the left and right panels.  It certainly ended up an irregular scarf, but still sort of cute.

L is for Lightning

I decided to start using up some of the leftovers, for this scarf, and picked a simple 2/2 twill with Oxblood for the warp and Lemon Yellow for the weft.  I thought it would make an interesting scarf if I did a bunch of random back-and-forth with the twill, and it did.  Then I realized that I was going to run out of yellow before the scarf was long enough, so I had to throw in a bunch of natural yarn to make up the difference, and I did it randomly in amongst the random twill.  It made for an interesting effect, overall.  If I had the choice, I would have rather it was just yellow, since I think that colour combination vibrates less, but as Tim Gunn would say: make it work.

Aphid Scarf

Getting all those placemats done opened up Miss Bennet for a new weaving project.  This time it was a lovely (and quick!) alpaca scarf.

Last winter, I made an alpaca scarf for my HLM, and I had someone at work admire it enough to offer to buy it from me.  Well, I could hardly give away his scarf, so I had to refuse the offer.  Since then, she's hinted a couple of times at wanting a similar scarf, something in houndstooth, in unorthodox colours...  So I decided to take her up on it and weave her a little something.

This scarf is made of sport weight fair-trade alpaca from Frog Tree Yarns, in a pale lime green and a cool grey brown, woven at 15 epi.  I chose an 8-shaft houndstooth, since I felt like it makes a bolder statement than a 4-shaft houndstooth would.  The houndstooth draft is a 4/4 twill, which gives long floats and lots of bias movement in the final cloth.  I fulled it a bit in the sink before laying it out to dry, to make the cloth more cohesive, and of course alpaca will naturally felt together with use, to stabilize the fabric even more.

It is light and soft and airy in the hand, but will be warm and cozy on her neck in the cold winter months.  Needless to say, I got myself enough yarn (in dramatically different colours, mind you) to make myself a similar one.

Rainbow Gamp Scarf

A colour gamp is a weaving project where you make a progression of colour stripes in the warp and match those stripes in the weft. It lets you see how various colours will interact with one another, in a woven design. They are often done just as an exercise for weavers to learn about colours in weaving, but they are so beautiful that I decided to use the idea for a scarf, instead.

The original scarf design was from Handwoven magazine, May/June 2009. It was done in a heavier yarn, made of alpaca, and used only two colours: ivory for the circles and brown for the borders. I wasn't very impressed with it, to be honest, and wondered if there was any way to make it more attractive. Colour is the obvious answer, and I thought that if I dressed it up in rainbow shades, it could be quite lovely. I decided to use Knit Picks Palette, since it comes in so many colours and is inexpensive and feltable. Of course, choosing a new yarn changed the sett and required me to do a lot of math to reconfigure the whole thing.


I showed you a close-up of the fabric on the loom, last time. I did finish weaving the scarf the next day, and twisted all the fringe the day after that. After some serious hand-washing and hand-fulling, I laid it flat to dry and ended up with a nice light warm wool scarf. I have been wearing it, which is why it looks somewhat wrinkly in the photos. I enjoyed weaving this scarf, and actually considered doing more of them in different colour themes: maybe shades of pink and orange or blues and greens...

It's the first time I have tried using all 8 shafts on my loom for a project. Fortunately it wasn't very complex, and I managed it without much difficulty. I think I might even try another 8-shaft project before going back to some simpler projects I have planned. Stay tuned.

Scarf Progress

I finally took some time during the last couple of days to put my new scarf project on the loom. Then, since the hard part was done, I started weaving it. As one would expect, the changing colours do encourage me to keep at it, and I am well past the part shown in this photo (taken during the first repeat of the design.) I'm actually about at the halfway point for the project, now.

It shows great promise on the loom, but once it's off and finished, the little coloured squares should be more like circles, and the woven colours should be smoother. Another day or two, and we'll know for sure.

A Year in the Planning

Okay, not really. I had it planned out and ready to go, way back when, but sometimes things just fall behind in the weaving queue, you know? So after making numerous showy towels and scarves and whatnot, throughout this whole year, I finally feel like this project's time has come. (I laughed when I read the bit in last year's post about "one more project before this one." A textbook example of the best laid plans, I think.) Perhaps the best impetus of all is that it's been a bit chilly of late, so why not prepare for the winter by weaving a toasty blanket?


I mentioned in that first post that I'm weaving it in two panels. This is the beginning of the first one, six repeats across and eighteen long. When I finish the second panel and attach them, the finished blanket will be twelve repeats by eighteen, which should be somewhere around 45 inches by 60 inches, the perfect size for napping on the sofa.

Revisiting the Kindergarten

The first pair of colours I matched up for the second series was some beautiful heathered Cascade 220, possibly my two favourites of all their many shades. There was a lovely sort of wheat yellow with green heathered throughout it, and a sort of greeny grey brown. They look lovely together, and have a bit more contrast to the naked eye than this photo would appear. What I love about this scarf, another version of Hopsack with a 2-colour warp, is that one side of the fabric has vertical stripes while the other side has horizontal stripes. I wish it was clearer in the photo, but nevertheless, it might give some little kid something to ponder.


The next pair of colours is also Cascade 220 -- I was planning to use the magenta with a dark wine red, but there wasn't enough contrast to show the pattern well, so I went in a very different direction and grabbed some more of the bright green. The two colours clash terrifically, which I think kids like, right? Anyway, I did a herringbone twill with some basketweave strips between. I saw a draft sort of like this one on Weavolution, and adapted it and cleaned it up a bit to use it for this scarf. I like how it turned out, and it certainly reminded me of how much I love a simple herringbone twill.


Lastly, I pulled bits of many of the colours I'd already used and wound a random little warp to weave in random stripes of plain weave. I decided to do plain weave instead of twill, because I wanted the various colours in warp and weft to intermingle and blend and create some interesting hues. I think it went pretty well, although I have to admit that I enjoyed this one the least, perhaps because I prefer having a bit of structure, rather than so much freedom. Is that weird? I also had to change the sett, to 8 ends per inch, which seemed maybe a bit loose on the loom, but fluffed up nicely once I soaked and washed and fulled it a bit.

A cute little stack of woolen scarves.