8 Shaft Checked Tea Towels

Hi there ! I promised a back to basics project and here it is ! Cotton tea towels.

I used a draft from Handwoven's Design Collection  #16 called Checked Tea Towels. I saw these towels woven by Dawn MacFall on Ravelry and thought how nice they looked. I didn't do the stripes as I wanted to use up some cotton for weft without being tied to a specific colour.

The cotton warp is 2/8 natural unmercerised cotton sett at 24 ends per inch in a 12 dent reed. The red weft is 2/8 cottolin, the peach colour is 2/8 cotton and the pale green colour is a linen, not sure of the weight but similar to the 2/8 cotton.

There were three treading drafts to choose from. I did the first red one in a straight 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 repeat and it looked like this...................

I then tried out the more complex treadling as drawn in and it looked like this............

Here is the draft I used.........

I really preferred this design and so the five remaining towels were done using that method.

I started out with 12 ends on each side to follow Janet Phillips selvedge threading but when I did the sample the edges didn't look good at all. I took out all but two of the edge threads and used those two as floating selvedges. If I do these again I would add a straight draw at the edges as the floats close to the edge made it a bit too wavy for my liking !

I machine stitched the towels before separating them and here is the neat pile waiting for me to hand hem them ! Please not the sample on the top !

Here is how they looked after hemming and machine washing. The cloth is quite a loose weave but not so loose it will cause problems. The towels measure 22" x 19 " now they are finished and I think they will be very serviceable.

Thought that might have used up all of my 2/8 cotton but no, it looks as if I could do another run of 6. Would like to get it used up and then move onto tea towels done with 2/16 cotton and linen.

Thanks for visiting, hope you like the towels !