Lessons Learned From A Plain Weave Dish Towel

The plan was to weave 3 simple dishtowels.  The inspiration was 2 beautiful skeins of hand painted linen - Linen Lace by Claudia, color way Ocean Depth.  I have used this yarn before in a different colorway.  Last time I combined a huck lace and a twill weave, and I wanted to do something a little different this time.  I decided to keep the structure simple - plain weave - and make it all about the color.

I did some yarn wraps to help decide what colors of cottolin would work well with the linen. I finally decided to use white and 4 shades of Bockens 22/2 cottolin: aqua (color #2076), bright turquoise (color #2074), cadet blue (color #2060) and periwinkle/lavender (color #2067).

 I used Fiberworks to design a stripe pattern where I had a background of white with stripes of the variegated linen that were bordered by narrow stripes of the solid colored cottolin. In the draft, the gray areas represent the variegated yarn.  Shown below is about 1/3 of the draft.  I fussed with the size of the variegated stripes until I was sure I would have linen for a warp for the 3 towels.  What is important is that some of the variegated linen areas were 2-3" wide - more about that later. 

I usually sett 22/2 cottolin (300 yds/lb) at 24 epi for plain weave for dishtowels.  That makes a very sturdy cloth that holds up very well.  I decided to sett this warp a little closer for 2 reasons: 1) I thought the linen was slightly thinner than the cottolin (a mistake I discovered later, ha ha), 2) the linen is variegated and I wanted to emphasize that, and 3) I knew I would be weaving with a finer weft (16/2 cottolin at 6700 yds/lb)

So the towels went onto the loom and wove up very quickly.  I only got about 16 ppi with this very fine weft which had me questioning whether I should have sett the warp at 24 epi instead of 27.  I wove the first towel with white 16/2 cottolin, the second with aqua, and the third with lavender.  I definitely liked the white the best. It was very fresh looking and did not wash out the warp colors at all, whereas the aqua and lavender barely had any effect on the overall color of the towels other than making them less crisp looking.

Overall I was happy with the towels.  They have a nice, soft hand which will only get softer with successive washings.  There is much room for improvement, however, on these simple plain weave towels

Lessons learned:

• Well, first of all be sure about what you are working with before you start.  Setting this at 27 worked out fine, but I think it might have been even better at 24, and if I had correctly realized that the linen was actually a little heaver than the cottolin, I probably would have sett it at 24.

• More importantly, I had wide areas of uninterrupted linen in the warp, some 2-3" wide.  The linen did not shrink in length as much as the cottolin.  That caused a little bit of a scalloped hem after washing.  Even with some creative hemming, my finished edge is not completely straight on any of the towels which you can probably tell from the picture on the right. SO in the future, when mixing cottolin and linen, I would plan narrower stripes and more evenly spaced stripes to minimize this problem.

• You never too experienced to learn something new from a simple little project.