1.23.19. Started weaving these towels yesterday. Surprisingly, no threading errors--or at least none that I’ve noticed, and only two crossed threads.

I wound an 8 1/2 yard warp with 10/2 unmercerized cotton from Yarn Barn,Georgia Yarn Company, and MNP Handwoven. I hope they’ll behave ok when I wet-finish. I just mixed them all up, because I had bits from several cones.

500 ends--496 for eight repeats of the pattern and doubled floating selvedge on each side. I don’t know what made me double the FS, but it seems to be okay.

Warping went great. Kelley helped me, so that was nice.

I have a bunch of 6/2 cotton left from making baby blankets, so I’m going to weave that up. I’m going to try to mix these up a bit--maybe a stripe or two in the weft. Maybe one repeat of the pattern and the rest plainweave. Not sure yet. The first one is going to just be the overshot pattern throughout. I started with 2 3/4 pw with 16/2 weft for hem and small white border. I have now written that down twice so that I can remember how to make the second hem the same.

2.21.19. Starting on towel 5, this one with dark gray weft. I like it very much. This one will have overshot through the entire towel.

I’ve had a couple little issues. I broke a bunch of warp ends on the left side near the selvedge early on--I adjusted the tension on a group of threads and looked at my throw, making sure to have a deep enough angle on the weft before beating. Something solved the problem, but both selvedges got a little wonky for a while. Everything seems okay now.

I really think there’s an error in the draft in the computer drawdown section of the book--an extra pick on treadle one near the end of the repeat. I am omitting that pick on the towels I’ve done since the first one.

I’m enjoying the towels. They’re fun, but the ones that are overshot throughout are slow to weave. No worries. No rush. Lots of other projects.

3.13.19. Finished weaving seven towels, took them off the loom, zigzagged, wet finished, hemmed, and washed. They’re okay, but not my favorites. I found one stinking treadling error in one of the towels, but probably not too noticeable unless you really look hard--just some extra repeats in one of the sequences. The four overshot towels are pretty enough. Thick and pretty heavy. The plainweave with overshot borders are problematic. Quite a bit more draw-in in the overshot sections, which I tried to avoid but did not. The plainweave feels pretty flimsy. Possibly would be better if I had beaten a bit harder, but sometimes my towels are too stiff, so I tried a lighter beat. The selvedges are wretched, probably mostly due to the same tension issues that caused a bunch of broken warps. And the yarn is super-linty. Will rethink my yarn cnoice in the future. I really like Bockens yarn, even though it’s expensive. This was a mixture of Georgia Yarn Company and some others--just using up stash, so I don’t know which was the linty culprit. Keeping these three towels for my kitchen and putting the four good ones in the give-away stash.