Thanksgiving Kitchen Towels

Project Dates: 10/15/2021 - 11/25/2021

November 25, 2021

Happy belated Thanksgiving Day!  Dave and I were invited to have thanksgiving dinner celebration with some new friends.  How we got this invitation, was a fun time itself!  We had gone over to our friends, our first visit to their home.  Amidst a lot of conversation about the gregarious family life they have, Dave innocently says, “Well, I would like to be invited to YOUR Thanksgiving dinner.”  And there it was, innocently, self-invited!  We tried to back out, because we were both mortified, that an innocent turn of phrase, resulted in that invitation.  But we went!  And then, my inspiration of towels, born out of a desire to thank our host, and a need to have a project on my loom!

I hunted through my considerable stash for towel warp.  I know I wanted to include some cotton crackle.  That made very absorbent towels this past summer.  Given the harvest theme, the colors were in the gold, yellow, and cinnamon range with a hefty dose of beige.  The warp ended up with cotton crochet thread in beige, pumpkin or cinnamon colored tencel, dark beige unmercerized cotton, and gold perle cotton.  The design was balanced along the center line of the towel.

I wanted to try something different for the weave structure.  After perusing from Weaving Innovations from the Bateman Collection (Spady, R., Tracy, N. A., Fiddler, M.), I selected an overshot design, Bateman #364-1 for four shafts.  It was quite an extensive treadling pattern with one hundred and four steps for one complete pattern treadling!

Boredom comes easily to me despite the complex treadling pattern especially with repetitive or single color designs.  Three towels were planned, so I designed three different weft color patterns.  The Bateman pattern and overshot call for a pattern weft and a tabby weft.  The overshot pattern weft was done with the cotton crackle.  For the tabby weft two towels were done in monochrome with the beiges.  The third towel was done in stripes.

 

With a little bit of warp still left after the three towels, I wove a small kitchen wash cloth.  Our friends thanked us for the handwoven gift.  Thanksgiving dinner was a smash hit!

 

Spady, R., Tracy, N. A., Fiddler, M. (2015). Weaving Innovations from the Bateman Collection. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Inc.