Satin Stripe Towels in Progress

The first 3 satin towels are either woven or in progress. Here's #1, which has a weft of mercerized, red-violet 20/2 cotton:



And #2, with a dusty coral weft in unmercerized 20/2 cotton:



And the end of #2 with the beginning of #3, in which I'm using the last of the 18/2 hemp/cotton blend that I dyed for the previous towel project.



Each has a different combination of 5-end satin variations. #1 uses just 1/4 and 4/1, so it looks as if there were only 2 threading blocks.

#2 uses all 4 variations, although it's difficult to see the difference between the 3/2 stripes and the 2/3 stripes. I'm hoping that after finishing, the differences will be more visible.

#3 uses 3 variations, 1/4, 4/1, and 2/3.

I'm weaving all the drafts with stripes first, using the thicker weft yarns, because with stripes it doesn't matter that the cloth isn't weaving to square (same ppi as epi). When I start weaving the drafts with blocks that change along the length of the cloth, I'll have to use finer weft in order to square the designs.

Luckily, I have a lot of cones of very fine mercerized cotton in the stash from a long-ago estate sale. Most are odd sizes that are no longer available to the handweaving market, such as 50/3 (14,000 yards per pound) and some even finer that have labels I can't decipher. Not that they're illegible, but that the count system on the labels is so drastically different from today's standard cotton count. Some are labeled with the tex system, which is translatable to yards per pound, but others I've not been able to figure out. Unless 600/3 is a tex count...maybe so - it's awfully fine!