Friday, April 18, 2014

Towels After the Calendar

I found myself wanting to continue to make colorful towels but since I finished the challenge of using a calendar to help select colors for the towels - what next?   

A friend gave me two pages from a "Better Homes & Gardens" magazine in which the magazine had challenged a make-up artist and an interior designer to come up with make-up and paint colors, respectively, to match a theme.  The first page I used for inspiration was the make-up challenge:  use a peacock feather to bring together make-up ideas.   The resulting colors looked nice, so I checked out my 10/2 cotton yarn collection.



I have found during this challenge that I really like playing with the colors.  Structures are interesting but it is the color that both challenges and interests me.  So as I started to design the "structure" part of the towels, I just selected some that I've used before with these towels - M's & W's on 8 shafts. The warp was sett at 24 epi.  The loom was tied up to my {now} standard 3-2-1-1-1 twill tie-up.  

I used each color of the warp as weft twice, except for the light brown (oak) and the medium fuchsia, since I ran out of both of those colors.  I did get a towel using the fuchsia as weft but only one very short "towel" using the light brown. 




I wove one of each colored weft as a straight 8-point twill.  The second towel in each color was woven as some thing different - tromp as writ (M & W treadling), extended point twill (1 ->8, 1-> 8, 7 ->1, 8 -> 1), irregular point twill (using random point sizes), etc.   

As in with past towels, I think they turned out beautifully.  The colors look nice together.  Although again, I don't think I would have ever thought (or would want to) use these colors. 

Details of towels with different colored wefts:














The towels using the second page are almost finished, so more on those soon...

2 comments:

Lynda Halliger Otvos (Lynda M O) said...

I like the colors of each one individually and as a set they work too. Nice job. Isn't it fun when we use colors we don't normally choose and the project turns out well !~! You have done quality work here. Thanks for sharing the process and the product. Happy Spring, Ingrid.

Ingrid said...

Thanks Lynda! It has really been an eye opener for me to experiment with color this way. Sometimes is it a bit of a leap of faith to commit to the colors in the warp and then use them in the weft. Or choose a color not in the warp for weft because you think it might look better than one of the warp colors. It has been great fun!