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!