Towels

The green-warp/blue-weft dish- (or hand-, or tea-) towels are in the process of being hemmed. Here's a stack of eight of them that are washed, pressed, and hemmed. Each is woven with a different liftplan, and there were 3 or 4 different shades of blue in the weft, so there's a lot of variation in the towels colorwise and designwise. Amazing what is possible on a straight-draw threading.

In the interest of speed, I'm machine-stitching the hems. I usually hand-stitch towel hems, but this is a very large run of towels and the time between today and the next show is getting away from me (see this earlier post for a really good example of a time-sink). Let's see: I wove 17 towels, each finished at about 18 inches, that's 36 inches of hem stitching per towel, for a total of 612 inches (or more simply put, 17 yards) of hemming. Which would take a long time by hand.

Also, there's an argument in favor of machine stitching related to durability. In any case, the folded towel in the upper left of the picture is machine stitched, and I'm finding it difficult to see the stitching line.

Some of the weaves, especially the waffles and the crepes, show a wonderful amount of texture after wet finishing - and a lot of it remains after pressing. I'll post some pictures tomorrow of some of the most textural cloth.