Kitchen Towels Off the Loom

I really love these kitchen towels. They are made from thick
and thin cotton, I forget the technical name for the type of
cotton right now. There may be some problems using these as kitchen towels as there are floats. There is also some yarn carrying up the sides for 4 rows at a time which could cause problems. We'll see. But in the meantime, I'll just enjoy looking at them.

San Jose California in February 2009

I just had to post this picture which I took this morning coming in to work. I was a passenger and the car was jiggling but I have an anti-jiggling thingie on the camera so it looks pretty clear to me. It's particularly interesting with the snow behind the palm trees.

The Towels Are Off The Loom

Yay! Took them off the loom last night and they look fantastic. I zig zagged the edges and washed and dried them and ironed this morning. Tonight I will cut them apart and hem them. I want to take them to the Blacksheep weaving study group tomorrow morning, along with a couple of knitting projects I've finished. This is a new group for me and I'm looking forward to going tomorrow (like I need another monthly meeting - I already belong to 3 guilds that meet monthly. But it's always good to be around fellow weavers to get your weaving mojo going and to learn new stuff. The guild meetings don't teach anything normally, they are either sharing what you're already doing or you are listing to someone talk about their work. It will be nice to be in a group where I actually learn something for a change.

Sweet Pea Coat

I finished this coat about a week or so ago. It was really an easy knit. It is a Kate Gilbert pattern that I downloaded from Ravelry. It was knit with a double strand of worsted weight yarn. I think I used Web's Northampton, which I absolutely love. I think the pattern was 2-1/2 sts. to the inch, and a really fast knit. There was a bit of confusion around the pocket area. She had you knit a separate little pocket liner and then insert that onto one side of the knitting at the top of the pocket area. But with the help of a fellow knitter, we figured that little puzzle out. I was also offered help by Kate Gilbert herself when I emailed her, which I thought was really nice. She said there might be a bit of a delay due to the volume of emails she gets at Twist Collective but she said I could definitely get help from her. I really appreciated that, even though I didn't take her up on it.

I have the sweater soaking as I write so I can block it out. It's about 2-3" too small at the moment but I think that can be fixed with blocking. I really like the sweater though and the buttons are bone and brass which I sent for from an online resource called www.ascuteasabutton.com. They had an amazing selection of buttons to choose from.

I'm weaving - yay!

In December I bought two weaving kits from the Yarn Barn of Kansas. They are nice people and their prices are good on most things. One kit are kitchen towels and the other kit contains yarn for colorful chenille bath mats. I got the loom warped this weekend and here is the beginning of three beautiful towels. I picked the colors because I love greens and blues and cool colors. The yarn is thick and thin mercerized cotton at 12 epi. That's an end feed shuttle and seems to be working very well. I still have a bit of draw-in on each side but not too much yet. We'll see how the rest of this weaving goes. Thank you Nancy Alegria for the inspiration to weave these towels. She posted a wonderful scarf with this design on www.weavezine.com in their first issue.

Cotton Chenille Towels

I wove these cotton chenille towels for xmas for my daughter. I wanted a bit of contrast for the darker stripes so I walnut dyed some of the chenille. It didn't come out quite as dark as I would have liked but I'm pretty pleased with them. I had problems with the selvedges. The yarn kept wanting to bunch up on the selvedges and pack in really tightly. I was thinking for a time that I would just keep these and use them since I don't care about that as much. Since they were a gift, I wanted them as perfect as possible. But the selveges were definitely not straight and even. Oh, also, I had quite a few little chenille pulls in the yarn. It must have been when the tension wasn't even and it would poke out the backside somehow. I surely didn't see anything like that from the topside. At first I thought they were skips but they are just little pulls.

Handwoven Towels

I am weaving some bath towels from 1000 ypp cotton chenille. They are coming out very well but I'm not very happy with the selvedges. They aren't absolutely horrible but they aren't really nice either. I think it's the chenille which is taking up the yarn much more than I thought it would. I'm using a set of home made temples and am watching the edges carefully but every now and then the edge threads tend to want to start scrunching up together and making a smooth area once in a while. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with them.

I walnut dyed the contrasting color in them.