Project: Rigid Heddle Two Tone Waffle Weave Towels

When I started weaving last fall I ordered a bunch of tea towel kits from various suppliers including a 6-month subscription to the "tea towel of the month" club offered by Cotton Clouds, an Arizona-based seller of fibres (especially natural fibres like cotton). 

The first kit that arrived from my Cotton Clouds subscription was a fun kit for waffle weave towels that was perfect for a novice like me.  It was a little daunting because it required me to sley my reed with 2 ends in each hole and slot (rather than the usual single end per hole or slot), and it required weaving with doubled threads on each pick rather than single threads, which was a first for me. 

The waffle pattern itself was quite easy, however, and perfect for someone like me who was just starting out.  The pattern used a single pick-up stick over a series of 5 rows, repeated along the entire 34" woven length of the each towel.

I ordered a kit with enough material for 4 towels and by setting up a 5-yard warp I had just enough warp to complete the towels with only minimal loom waste.  The kit calls for Aurora Earth 8/2 unmercerized cotton in three different shades - - in this case, natural, navy blue and copen, with the navy blue used as stripes of the warp and as the weft. 

It was my first time working with 8/2 unmercerized cotton, or with a yarn so fine in general (31 wraps/inch), and I found it was easier to work with than I expected - - I had initially thought it would be tangle-city, but it actually tangled less than anticipated. 

However because each towel required 3" of hem in tabby weave (1.5" on each end) and 34" of waffle weave, the fine yarn took me longer than usual to weave the entire project - - just over two weeks.  With my more robust Peruvian cotton towels it takes no more than a weekend to weave 4 towels, so the fine yarn does have its challenges.  Namely, that it challenged my patience.

As with all projects, I learned a lot as I went along, and the last couple of towels were much faster to weave up than the first towel by a long shot.   This was in part because I no longer had to look up the pattern with every pick, I simply kept track of which pattern row I was working with a handy counter.

Overall my tension was fine for the project even with the 5-yard warp, and I didn't have any issues with broken warp threads.  I saw after finishing that I had incorporated a few of my trademark* errors into a couple of the towels, in this case a couple of unintentional weft floats, but I think this just adds to the character of the finished pieces. 

The unmercerized cotton is quite stiff coming off the loom, and it really helps the pattern to pop.  After washing the fabric softened right up and developed a wonderful soft texture, much more so than I expected. 

I have to confess that finishing these towels pushed me all the way out of my comfort zone because not only were these not hemstitched on the loom, I was going to have to machine stitch a hem on each end, something I had never done before.  I had last worked at a sewing machine in my senior public school home economics class, and I can assure you that I remembered almost nothing from those days.  Except that I had sewed my teacher's skirt to my sewing bag, a memory I wish I could forget. 

Up to last month I did not even have a sewing machine (because I did not sew, natch), but I could see that sewing hems was going to come up sooner rather than later the more I wove.  As it happens a dear family friend was no longer using one of her sewing machines and she was kind enough to lend the machine to me, while the Nerd's mother (a ridiculously accomplished sewer and ninja-level quilter) gave me a crash-course on sewing hems.  Thus armed I was only "completely terrified" to tackle hemming these towels rather than "incoherently gibbering" which is what I suspect would have happened otherwise.

All in all, though, the finished hems didn't look too terribly bad - - not perfect by any means, but nice looking and functional in that they were, in fact, hems (rather than loose and uneven with dangly bits hanging out all over).

As for the finished products, the kit claimed that the finished towels would measure 17" x 28" after washing and hemming.  My towels each ended up being around 17.5" x 27.5", which is close enough for my purposes - - all the (minor) variation in length came from variation in my hems between the individual towels.  I was frankly happy to see how much the towels shrunk up in length after washing and drying because the 37" total length was a little huge looking when I initially separated the finished work into the individual towels. 

The photos below show the detail of the two sides of the waffle weave, front and back.  Both sides are interesting and nice to look at, which is a plus. 

The Nerd and I have already claimed one of the towels for our own kitchen.  It seems to be fitting in well. 

* Not an actual trademark, just a figure of speech, pace, all you trademark lawyers out there.