Wednesday, November 09, 2016

First handwoven towels, finally finished.


Here are my first set of handwoven towels.  Woven with a 9/2 linen warp and 4/2 cotton weft (photographed on a background of handwoven sweater - oh, the sweater turned out lovely, lofty, lightweight and excessively warm).

To be completely frank, I don't like these towels at all.  The treadling errors are okay, I guess, one can live with that.  It's just they look so bla!  Individually the colours are lovely, together they look nice, but as towels, they look dull and boring.  Except for the errors, a machine could have made these.  If I'm going to put this effort in, I want it to look better than what a machine can make.

Which means, it's time to take steps and learn about colour.  It was these towels that inspired me to try warping two or more colours together at the same time.  So far, so nice.  But I have a lot to learn about colour and design.

1 comment:

Josiane said...

Your sweater fabric looks great! It must be lovely to wear, and perfect to keep you warm this winter.

What little I see of your towels looks nice, but I get how you can find them boring. It's interesting how, once woven, colours can sometimes turn out to look better than expected, and how other times the finished cloth turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. There's a lot to explore and learn about the way colours interact in weaving. I know of a weaver who does very interesting things with colours. Here are links to a couple of her posts, in case you see something there that would inspire you:
http://blog.schafenfreude.com/?p=380
http://blog.schafenfreude.com/?p=389
(Notice also the picture in her blog's header: that's another one of her beautiful warps.)
I'm looking forward to seeing where your explorations of colour and design will lead you!