Classic Red Striped Tea Towels $7 USD PDF

I fell in love with this pattern the second I saw it. It is sized to make teeny, tiny tea towels--12.5 x 25 inches--so I enlarged it by adding 2 pattern repeats. I also added an extra 4 ends at the beginning and end.

This pattern has a ticking look, and I think that is why I love it so much. Plus, the color combination, the red and natural warp with the ivory weft, makes the plain weave look more complex than it is. (Let’s face it, there’s nothing complex about plain weave itself, but you can get astounding results with plain weave by your choice of warp and weft threads.)

There is an error in the warp instructions; Sequence B should end with 6 Cerise, not 6 Natural. Otherwise, the pattern is well written and clear.

Winding the warp is a bit of a nightmare not only because of the frequent color changes, but also because those color changes often are single ends. I wound a 4.5 yard warp on my Schacht 4.5-yd warping board, and in spite of going slowing and counting and recounting, and recounting again, I ended up with 3 mistakes in my warp: 4 extra natural ends (together), 1 missing natural end, and 2 missing red ends (together), so my loom has 4 ends hanging off the warp beam and a white and two red ends hanging off the back beam.

Even though this warp is threaded as a straight draw and sleyed 2 ends per dent in a 10 dent reed, I managed to have two sleying errors, two threading errors, and one missed heddle eye, which I supposed is also a threading error, that I had to correct, but fortunately they were all near the left selvedge and didn’t require me to do a lot of untying.

Once I finally got the errors fixed, it was smooth sailing. The pattern uses a single weft color and the structure is plain weave, so it goes pretty fast. I hope to get 4 nice-sized towels out of the warp, and after weaving 2 towels with ivory weft, I might weave a couple with borders.

I have to say that while it was a royal pain to get the heddles threaded correctly and to correct my sleying errors, it was worth the effort because these towels are going to be gorgeous.

I tried using red weft, but I really don’t like the way it looks. First of all, the solid red sections clash with the red warp/ivory weft sections, and also, using the red weft changes the look of the stripes and makes them look rather ordinary. The red stripe will be removed and all the towels will be made with the ivory weft.

8-28-22
I finished the weaving tonight. I ended up with 4 towels at 33 inches on the loom, including the hems. I wove them all the same. The runt, i.e. the weavable remnants of the warp, is 16-¼ inches long including the hems. I wove it using the red thread for weft, and did a small band of twill (1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4) right after and right before the beginning and ending hems just out of curiosity to see how twill would look on this threading. The answer is Meh! The red weft looks good as long as you don’t look at it next to a piece woven with the ivory weft.

I plan to cut the warp off the loom today, and maybe even sew between the towel and cut them apart in preparation for sewing the hems.

9-1-22
Hems are sewn, towels are washed and pressed, and awaiting their second and final pressing. I always hard press the towels while they are damp out of the dryer and hang them on a drying rack to make sure they are completely dry. For some reason, even though they look fine when I place them on the rack, they end up with wrinkles and creases after hanging for a short time, but a second pressing, with steam, sorts that out.