This project proved once again that life is the greatest enemy of any progress. Records show that I set up the loom back in January, but it took me until June to produce results.
It all started with Wheel Magazine Nr. 33 and the article Thoughtful Towels by Stefan Moberg. Looking at it, I immediately knew I wanted to try it. I had read about waffle weave before and had thought about experimenting with it, but hadn’t had anything specific in mind. I had done lots of dish towels but bath towels had never been on my radar. So this was something new and exciting to dive into.
Since both the weave structure and the yarn mentioned in the article (Ashford cotton 5/2) were new to me, I decided to pretty much stick to the instructions to get a feel for what I was doing. I merely adjusted the sett to match my metric reed and chose different colours. I like to play around with blues, so I chose three colours from the available colour range.
I was a little dismayed at the price of the yarn. From my calculations, I would need three cones of each colour which ended up costing me over €160. During warping, I was a little disappointed about the quality of the yarn. I ended up cutting out some parts due to knots or unravelling yarn.
I chose to use the different colours in stripes about 4 cm wide on the loom, repeating the pattern eight times. Judging by the final results I should have used wider stripes, as the smaller stripes created a bit of a visual overload.
Setting up the loom proved straightforward. As usual, the most time-consuming part was threading. It took me almost a week, adding up to 4 working hours in total.
For the first towel, I matched the stripes in the warp with stripes of equal width in the weft. I noticed fairly quickly that wider stripes would have made for a more harmonious pattern. I switched to stripes three times as wide for the second towel hoping for a better result.
The project ended up sitting dormant on the loom for some time over the following months, as life happened to intervene. Once I got back to it, I quickly realised that I wouldn’t be able to get the second towel to the full length of 2m. I ran out of warp at least 20cm before reaching that point and wasn’t even able to add a plain weave seam at the end.
The intended waffle pattern was already evident on the loom and even more so after cutting the fabric off. I hemmed in the seams and washed the two pieces, which is where the true magic happened. The beauty of waffle weave is that due to its structure, the threads shrink to different degrees, creating a 3D structure with little indentations. This worked perfectly, creating a nice, soft, thick fabric, ideal for towels, just as the article had promised.
The downside of this process is that the fabric shrinks quite a lot. Both towels had been 88 cm wide off the loom and came in at 66 cm after washing. I would prefer them to be wider but I had already used almost the full width available on the loom. The first towel that I had worked to the full 2m on the loom came in at a finished length of 1,45m and the second one at 1,29m.
I ran into some trouble sewing the final seams and I am still not sure if it was due to a faulty sewing machine or the thick fabric.
In the end, I was rewarded with two very nice towels. I’d probably fiddle with the pattern next time, but I can easily see myself playing around with this kind of thing more.
Snathanna 