Now that I’ve given all my end-of-year gifts, I can post my work over the past many months! This year I got into weaving and doing dish towels felt approachable and they’re a classic weaver’s project. I’ve posted some that I already worked on here, and then started getting ideas…

First was to pull colors from nature, pictures I take while out and about. Picking a four or five color palette to work with is NOT a strength of mine, I love chaos too much. I started with a picture I took on vacation in Redwoods National Park last year and one of the sunrise in Rocky Mountain National Park. Conveniently, these two had some shared colors so I went with dark green and brown for the warp, and others for the weft.

I started with the mountain colors, working in 2/2 twill, changing weft colors on a whim, sometimes using clasped weft to do half-rows of color. It became clear pretty quickly that the colors I chose were not really that representative of my picture inspiration, and more just red, yellow, and blue. But those three colors are still fun to with. The dark warp just got lost, I’m not sure why it isn’t as present in the final towels, but maybe it just serves to make the weft pop. I renamed these as the “primaries” series, but I still want to make a sunrise series.

Then I started in on the tree towels – but this was the longest warp I’d wound on, and the tension was pretty wonky, to say the least. In retrospect, I think a couple things happened: the tension wasn’t even as the warp was wound on and I wasn’t putting in dividers often enough, which meant there were more overlapping threads in the middle of the bar, which meant the circumference that the warp was winding onto was not equal across the warp. In other words, the sides of my warp didn’t have enough thread and the center had too much, and it was a whole hassle. I ended up unwinding it and trying again, because my weaving was so uneven and it was frustrating to work with.

It meant I lost some warp, or length, of my project (yielded 3 towels instead of 6 like the other), but it was worth it for how nicely the towels actually turned out, and the ease of the experience afterward.

Then I had nice leftovers from lots of projects, so I had to do a scrappy, chaotic set of towels. I wanted to do some sort of “color and weave” pattern, where both the way the colors in the weft and warp are laid out AND the weave structure create a specific look. Most color and weave patterns are using dark and light colors, so I divided up my leftovers into darks and lights and started looking for ideas. I wanted to do a houndstooth pattern, and stuck to a 2/2 twill on four shafts to keep it simple 🙂 these were so fun. I did stripes of four light threads and four dark threads on the warp and the weft, with a few stripes of two just for experimentation’s sake. I used the same light/dark pairs in the weft as I did in the warp, so there are little islands of perfect houndstooth among a sea of kinda-houndstooth.

Then, I thought I was done with towels for a moment, but a friend revealed to me she didn’t have any towels and I could not let that stand. I immediately chose colors that went with her apartment decor and a really pretty weave structure I’d been eyeing with no real plan to use. This braided twill (Strickler’s #181) has things in common with a twill, kind of like a point twill, but it creates diamonds that share sides instead of freestanding diamonds. I wanted to do a plaid, because I think stripes are cool and wanted to understand some of the color blending between the three colors I chose. A plaid just uses the same color pattern for the weft as it does for the warp, turned 90 degrees. I figured I’d make the weft stripes whatever width I wanted (or however much yarn I put on my bobbin), but keep the same color order. So I made my warp stripes, wound bobbins of differing lengths for fun, and started weaving. It’s a 10 treadle pattern, so it actually got into my brain and body pretty quickly and I was able to weave this fast. I did do some “2/2 twill” treading just to go even faster, since I was on a time crunch. I yielded 7 towels, so I consider it a win. I really liked the high contrast with the dark purple, but the interaction between the two lighter colors was not as interesting.

These towels were so fun to make and learn with – I got lots of experience winding on long warps, saw how different colors interact with each other, and tried a new weave structure. I think towels are so low stakes for learning and mistakes. No one cares if they’re a little wonky, or the tension isn’t quite right. I kept the weirdest offcuts for myself, either as napkins or towels, and gifted the rest. I sewed in little tags on all the corners, and I even made little labels to feel extra fancy.

Projects completed December 2025.