New Bath Towels

Coincidentally, late last year I received two orders for bath towel sets with greys and cream.

Greys and cream with black

Greys and cream with seafoam for a new bathroom

After following colour requests for the first four towels, I veered off and tried some different ideas.  These towels are all 100% cotton, generously sized at approximately 160-170 cm x 80 cm (63-67" x 31"), and ready to wrap up in and dry off after a bath or shower.  Price is $90 each.

Light blue stripes edged in white | Diamonds in greens

Slub cotton in two slightly different shades | These towels go together well

"Still Going Strong"

A friend in Ontario sent me that title on an email with this photo:

The towel is "still going strong" and I recalled that I gave it to her on a milestone birthday.  You can see that the plain weave hem has faded a bit and the label's edges are a bit beat up from washing agitation.  Here's what she added:

Anyway, isn't it an awesome  towel? Fourteen years of consistent wear and tear, and it still looks like a towel I like having in the kitchen. Lots of others become stained or faded so quickly. I have orange, red and baby blue Jane Perry towels. I know it sounds weird saying one has a favourite tea towel, but it's true - they are!!

Lovely feedback, makes me happy.  Thank you happy towel owner!

Introducing! ... 80/20 Towels

Cariboo Handwoven towels, all the hundreds of them so far, have been 100% cotton. I regularly hear nice comments that they are the best - they dry hands and dishes well, they dry out quickly for the next use, and they last for ages. All of that very positive feedback has certainly inspired me and given me the comfort that my towels are worth their price. As well, I have more than a bit of fun with the patterns and colours.

I've had a supply for quite awhile of cottolin from Sweden, which is a lovely blend of 60% cotton and 40% linen. Linen is renowned for being absorbent and adding a little more body to a fabric. The colours I bought long ago are rich and harmonious. I decided to pull out all this cottolin and weave it on a cotton warp for towels.

Do the math: 60/40 cotton/linen weft woven on a 100% cotton warp gives an 80/20 blend overall, roughly speaking. I've always liked the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, which is that 80% of results come from 20% of the causes or inputs. This is thought-provoking in many ways - in our personal lives and our work, for starters.

But back to 80/20 towels - here are some samples:

80/20 towels have life and energy, and they should perform even better than pure cotton ones. I'm featuring them at $38 each, or three for $110, from my studio or at a craft fair. I was pleased to witness one studio visitor in early September spy the first ones stacked far away and be immediately attracted to them. My supply was soon reduced by two ... and then by two more this morning!

New Towels for a New Year

Most of Canada saw very cold temperatures at the end of December, and much of the country is still in the deep freeze. I see these cold snaps as an opportunity to avoid any automatic griping about being stuck inside for most of the day - instead, it's carefree studio time.

I ran out of towels again in December after weaving almost 300 this year, every one different, and sold 260 before the Christmas season. So slipping in another towel project seemed like a good idea.

Cold weather asks for warm colours. I used blues, burgundy with dark orange, and greens in the warp, and pretty well everything in the weft for different tests and effects. I have to say that I love every one of these towels!

(Note: All the reds came out in these photos brighter and more intense than they are in reality to the eye.)

If you're interested in any towels (these photos or others), please let me know. Prices remain unchanged in 2018 at $34 each or three for $98.

Have a great 2018!

"The towels are here!"

I mailed six towels earlier this month ...

Georgian Bay Towel

Shades of green with narrow stripes of Tuscan gold (left) and mauve (right)

Different twill weaves in soft shades of greens and blues

... and received this in reply:

The towels are here! And they are gorgeous! How lovely to have seen them (or their near neighbour) on your loom!! Thank you Jane. I look forward to seeing you again.

Yup, that's a big reason I do this! :-)))

Update: Here's what the buyer shared with me in late December:

I gave away all but one of your beautiful towels, 2 in Vancouver, one to California and another to Halifax, and one to PEI and I have received enthusiastic thanks from all corners!  What a treat to be able to share your wonderful work.

Towel Sets

Continuing on the topic of towels ... my original order for two bath and hand towel sets as a wedding gift created a lot of interest in similar towel sets. I also received an order for hand towels and a fair bit of support and interest that I was finally back in the studio. Of course I promised myself not to try to make up for two months away, but it's hard to stick to that. The fall craft sale season is coming up, I have tons of ideas swirling around in my head, I've been thrilled to be back, and I'm seeing several studio visitors every month while making plans for more.

The original requestor of the towel set received seven bath towels to view and select from,  then I wove the 'closey-matchy' hand towels. Here's a bath towel next to a hand towel being woven. The stripes matched perfectly when the hand towel was finished and washed.

More bath towel photos went out by email to the second interested person, and same thing:

Finished set of one hand and one bath towel

Accompanying set of hand towel and bath towel as a second set, with test hand towel on right

The towel with the brown on the right was a test for a bathroom of blues and brown, but we decided it was a bit of a red herring so it's available on its own.

Here's what the latest recipient of towel sets said:

I was just thinking today that I wanted to send you an email to let you know we love the beautiful towels. The blues are going to be absolutely perfect in [the] bathroom. 

The sets are fun to make, especially when I know interested people are waiting to see them. No one is ever obligated because I do not want pressures or expectations for the potential buyer or the weaver herself. But I do get great ideas through the process - thank you all!

A Special Towel Order

A long-time friend - gee, we go back to our university days working together as summer students in our forestry jobs - well, she has been a big fan of my towels. After I blogged about being back in my studio, what would appear in my inbox but an order for eight towels.

She wrote:

If you have any tea towels similar to the ones below I’d like to get 8 of them please.  Or you could send pictures of what you have in inventory, and I’ll pick from that.

I plan to wrap them with some black currant jelly I made as Christmas gifts.  

All of the towels in the photos she pasted in from my past blog posts had some bright red. So my interpretation for the order of eight was to include bright red in each one. Totally cool idea to wrap homemade jars of black currant jelly in a towel!

I didn't have too many towels left that were that bright and I'd just begun a towel project, so I decided to weave all of them at once for my friend. All her gifts would come from the same warp, which I suppose represents a certain unity from the giver to her recipients.

Here are the towels on the front beam of the loom and then unfurled on the floor.

Little bits of bright red are visible on the edge of the cloth near the centre of the front beam

Unfurling the warp - always a delight for the weary weaver ...

I asked my friend if she wanted photos of each towel to approve of it before I sent it. The response?

Jane those are beautiful! I love them, and don't need to review them.   Please just send the 8 you are thinking of.  I am very excited to get them. 

And this was my way of integrating bright red differently into a variety of towels.

Update:

And here's what my friend wrote to me when she saw the towels with her own eyes:

What gorgeous colours you picked. Some more blue, some more green, and all with some red. You are a Master to create all those variations at one time.  There's even one that sure looks like Christmas trees in the pattern.  Couldn't figure out just how you did that,  but then saw the pictures on your post tonight.  What timing!

That was a special towel order indeed!  Thank YOU!

Bath Towels

A studio visitor in June came over specifically to talk about bath towels as a wedding gift to a family member. She was looking for two bath towels with hand towels. We joked they would not be matchy-matchy, but just closey-matchy. That means the smaller hand towels would probably have a slightly different warp but I would match up the horizontal weft pattern that I weave to make them look like sets. I've done this before and it looks great.

Seven bath towels in blues are ready for drop-off and viewing tomorrow.

What doesn't have a closey-matchy hand towel woven to make a pair will just go on its own.

Obviously, I've been working quite a bit with blues ... time for more greens, purples, oranges and burgundy.

Yes, it is GOOD to be back in the studio!

Added Adventures in Advancing Twill

A second towel project this year in advancing twill gave me the chance to use similar and new treadlings on a similar threading as my recent project, but in lighter warp colours. I felt like I was on a bit of a roll and I wasn't ready to leave advancing twill quite yet. The lighter colours in the warp generally needed medium to dark colours in the weft to show the pattern.

I beamed on a long warp of close to 20 m in length (23 turns on the back beam). This gave me 26 towels in total, but by the last few I had run out of favourite colours and good ideas. This was a good thing though because it pushed me into trying new patterns, and I discovered some new ideas to pursue later. This is so typical: towards the end of the warp I want to finish it all and start something new, then I feel almost heartbroken to weave the last towel when I was on a fresh surge.

I also learned how the little glitch in the centre section was incorrectly threaded. It's a bit off kilter although I doubt anyone will mind too much - just me. I figured out the error and now I want to do a third project with the correction. That's already beamed onto the loom. :-)

Here are some of the towels with the lighter warp.

Ask Me Almost Anything About Advancing Twill

I've been enjoying advancing twill patterns in my blankets and towels over the years. An article a year ago in the premier issue of Heddlecraft encouraged me to work with it again for a towel project. When I say you can ask me almost anything, I have to emphasize 'almost' because this blog's title is meant to be a bit silly ... and readers know by now that I absolutely adore alliteration. :-)

So, if you want to know anything more than the little I share here - definitely go to Heddlecraft or explore advancing twill another way.

In these towels, I designed the threading for the 26" width and used different treadlings with a twill tie-up of 3-2-1-2 for the eight harnesses. It's exciting to create different sequences and see the results. The selvedges took a bit of a hit in their quality, and I had to do some manual improvements at the end of certain sequences when the edge thread was not being woven in. If I missed it for awhile, that edge thread forms a small loop, but is likely to shrink in with washings and not be too prominent. The antidote to that problem is to use a floating selvedge, I know.

Anyway, here are some of my experiments ... using bright colours in cold and dark January to brighten things up.

"You Are Always In My Kitchen"

A friend sent me this to begin my new year with a lovely thought:

You are always in my kitchen.  Had a bunch of people over for dinner tonight so was in kitchen a lot today, and using your towel which made me think of you. Such a lovely little reminder.

I think I'll go and weave more towels now - such inspiration!

Twenty-Two Tony Two-Twill Towels

Towels have been selling well at various craft sales and local outlets, and from both my studio in BC and Alison's house in Ottawa. I wove a lot of towels this summer, as I can never have too many in stock or too much fun in making them, and now I'm really glad I kept pumping them out.

The Station House Gallery asked for more towels last week, so I beamed a warp with Jon on Monday and finished weaving all of them by Friday. Cold winter weather helped make that happen - nice to be weaving away in my cozy, sunny studio.

The lengthwise blue stripes have what I call fuzzy twill lines (threaded 1234 1234 5678 5678), then the reds in the middle have typical clean twill lines (threaded 12345678). I experimented with various diamonds and treadlings, and just had a lot more fun with towels again.

And here are some samples of my latest 22 two-twill cotton towels. All are machine wash and dry, long-lasting, and every one an original!

Please let me know if you're interested in any towels, either ASAP or next year. 

Towels, Towels, Towels

It may be a silly title, but it's a big part of my weaving life lately - designing, playing around and weaving towels. Both looms have seen some long warps for towels.

Jon and I have each woven a few towels in waffle squares on the old loom. They're warped at 28" wide to allow for ample take-in from this weave structure. I've woven many blankets, small and large, in waffle weave over the years, and these should work really well as absorbent, quick-drying towels. This is the weave structure I call waffle squares.

On the new loom, I continued with more towels in advancing twill. I finished a commission for two table runners ...

... then wove more towels in a variety of colours and patterns.

Next project, I combined advancing twill and straight twill diamonds in the latest set.

Straight twill goes down the centre with advancing twill on each side.

And my latest project is to combine a towel and small cloth in a set, which has been requested too many times to remember. Good idea!

Towels are fun to design and to weave, and Cariboo Handwoven towels are popular as gifts because they're so unique while working well throughout their long lifetime. Summertime is best for weaving with cottons; I'll surely return to the wool blankets when the weather starts to cool.