This set of towels were a challenge from a color perspective. The inspiration picture had two prominent colors - bright green and blue. There weren't too many other colors present. This picture shows all of the yarns I originally thought about using to weave these. In the end, I didn't use the beige/tan in the front and the natural in the back was replaced by a very light blue. I often have used colors in approximately the same proportion as in the picture, but because of the dominance of these two colors, that wouldn't really work. However, I did use a lot of the bright springy green.
As with the other towel in this study, I used the Random Stripe Generator
http://www.biscuitsandjam.com/stripe_maker.php to create the striping sequence. I did adjust the amount of each color to fit the rough color proportion I wanted in the piece. When deciding on the width of the stripes, I chose to use Fibonacci numbered widths from 2-21, (i.e., 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21) but used very few of the 21 width stripes so that there weren't as many large areas of any of the very strong colors. Other than that, the design was fairly random. It is interesting to see now that one half of the warp has smaller stripes and the other has more wider stripes.
These towels were woven with 10/2 perle cotton sett at 24 epi and probably 20-22 ppi. The warp was threaded to a regular 8-point twill and tied-up as a 2-2-1-1-1 twill that I have been using for all of these towels. I made two of each using the following warp colors: green, brown, silver, light blue and yellow. I wove one towel in each color as a regular 8-pt twill. The companion towel was either wove as a straight treadling (1 --> 8, 1-->8 ) or with irregular sized points - depending on how I felt that day.
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| All Ten Towels |
Here are the five separate color combinations:
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| Light blue weft |
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| Silver weft |
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| Yellow weft |
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| Green weft |
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Brown weft
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I have to say that although I am not a big fan of green, I love all of the towels and their color combinations. My first weaving teacher suggested that if you pick colors from a picture that you like, you will like the resulting colors together in your woven piece. I have certainly found this to be true as I work through this calendar towel project.
The next set of towels will be a real challenge. It is August and is a sunset picture. The colors represented are roughly: orange, brown and black. We'll see how that turns out.
