One of the first projects I had done when I dove back into weaving after a long break was a set of rainbow-coloured dish towels. It started out as just a rainbow coloured warp, inspired by the gorgeous yarn colours I encountered while searching for suitable warp yarn. I just couldn’t decide which colour to use, so a multi-coloured warp it was.
I loved the dish towels that developed from that starting point but two things had always bothered me.
1.) I had used a thin (16/2) cotton yarn, used as double thread. That meant having to do a lot of winding yarn back and forth to turn the single bobbins into double thread. It slowed the whole process down.
2.) As I moved on to other projects, I was no longer satisfied with the size of the original dish towels. On later projects, I tended to weave larger towels which were a joy to use. The original ones seem almost tiny in comparison now.
With those two issues in mind, I had long been thinking about doing a revised version.
For the second attempt, I chose an 8/2 cotton yarn. Unfortunately, some of the originally used shades were not available for that yarn so I had to adjust the colours a bit in some places. I still managed to put together a nice rainbow and was set to go.
One tedious aspect of a project like this is warping. Because of the colours alone, I had to buy six different bobbins of yarn, which wasn’t cheap, so I saw no choice but to do single-thread warping. It took me a total of over three hours spread over three days to get the warp ready.
During the warping process, I noticed that the pegs on my warping frame started to bend slightly under the pressure of the threads. This explains why I kept having tension issues resulting in uneven thread length. I haven’t found a solution to this problem yet, but at least I now know what to look out for.
Once the warping was done it was smooth sailing from there on. The beauty of this kind of weave is that it creates a complex, multi-shade pattern while using a simple plain weave.
One thing I had to figure out was sizing the colour stripes right. For the first towel, I used 5 cm high stripes, which didn’t work out at all with the desired length. I was aiming for 40×60 cm towels which gave me a loom size of about 50×80 cm. When I switches to 4 cm stripes I managed to get each towel in close to the desired 80 cm mark.
One challenge lay in the constant colour changes. Having to juggle between six colours takes up a number of bobbins and sometimes I had to first empty one bobbin to be able to wind a new one.
My eight-meter warp gave me eight finished towels, including the one shorter one at the beginning.
I ran into some trouble during the finishing process as sewing the hems produced ripped threads in the fabric. With some expert advice, I found out that it was due to a damaged needle and once I had replaced that I was able to finish the towels.
I am quite happy with the texture, size and colour scheme so that I won’t need to do any adjusting if I want to produce more of these colourful treasures.
Snathanna 