315-4 refers to the threading and the threading for the towels below, it comes from A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns.
I have seen a few pictures of this draft woven as tea towels and scarves on various blogs and Ravelry, and thought it might be fun to do. My plan is to do a few towels, off-white for the warp and a bright colour for the weft (a different colour for each towel), in 2/8 organic cotton. But I thought I might first do a trial run in some 2/8 Cottolin, and make notes.
I made a lot of notes while weaving these “samples”, notes for what I did, and notes for what I will do differently.
The green towel with the stripe was the first one I wove, I had seen a few others woven with a stripe and thought I liked it. Note 1: no stripe, I don’t like it, I think it takes away from the pattern. Note 2: harder beat. While the green one looks okay, they are definitely to drapey for a towel (at least I think so). The second towel was woven with a denser ppi, I like it a lot better. There other little notes, but I won’t bore you with all the details.
My “samples”:
Happy weaving,
Kelly
I don’t like the stripe either. It would be much nicer if the towel was the color of the warp, and the stripe was a contrast.
I agree that the weave must be tighter so rings and things don’t pull the overshot threads.
Samples can be such a pain to make, but they sure are worthwhile to refer to!
I love handwoven towels. We can’t differentiate between the ones that I made years ago, and the ones that just came off of my loom, even though we wipe our foody hands on them, and wash them in the machines on hot.
I just now posted on my blog about a towel that I gave as a gift. I would love to read your thoughts about it.
Thanks for the feedback WeaverGrace. Actually, I think it would be a shame if the towel was the same colour as the warp as all that threading and treadling would be lost except for the stripe. While it does sort of look like overshot, it is actually a twilll.