A trio of towels

When we left off, I had finally – after some struggle – warped the loom for towels. And it was so pretty. Here you can see the thinner (8/2 cotton) green yarn I used for the hem area (to reduce bulk when folding it over to hem), as well as the first bit of white weft (in 8/4 cotton): And let’s just take a moment to admire the custom paint job S1 did for my little Cricket:

I wove along rather happily. One happy outcome of acquiring the loom stand is that I can sit comfortably on the couch, with a big pillow behind my back, because the stand legs can slide under the couch a little bit. Excellent for Netflixing!

As I wove along toward the end of the warp, I noticed that the finished cloth was no longer centered on the front beam. Why? Well, when I got to the very end, it was painfully clear why:

You don’t have to be a weaver to see there’s something wrong here. Everything is supposed to be at 90 degrees in weaving, and this most certainly is not! I also had some trouble with uneven threads toward the end, because this is how some of them went over the back beam: Hmmm.

I just kept going – there didn’t seem to be any fix for it at that point. When I pulled the finished cloth off the loom, it was a long mess like this:

That purple yarn is waste yarn that separates each of the towels. You can really see the light green hem section in the picture above. I also found some mistakes (skipped threads) at this point, like these:

Yikes! There is actually a way to fix these, and it should be done before the fabric is wet finished. (At this point, the weaving is really more of a web than fabric. Even after being released from the tension of the loom, there are pretty big holes in it – like a screen.) Do you want to see a fix? See the white warp (vertical) thread near the middle that goes over several weft rows:You can fix that by cutting it:

And then weaving in another white thread (just using a tapestry needle) that bridges the gap. There will be doubled warp for an inch or so, but that’s no big deal:

Then I machine washed the whole thing in hot water and dried it on high. I was amazed to find out that the web really does turn into fabric!

The only problem is that they aren’t very big towels anymore. Before washing, the lengths of each towel were 22-23”. After washing, they were 19.25-19.75”. The finished width is only 12.125” (I forgot to measure width before washing).

I hemmed one of the six ends. Here is how it looks before hemming (I machine-stitched a zigzag over the edge because I was paranoid about it unraveling):

And here is the finished hem:

I used the same thinner (8/2) green thread to hem with… but you can see it shows through on the right side a little. I will wait to finish the other edges until I have some white 8/2 cotton.

I tried to keep some notes to help me have more success on my next project:

• Check my apron strings – are they really all the same length?
• It is very, very hard to wind on evenly. Would it be easier with the direct warp method?
• Don’t use wool for waste yarn if washing before removing it (the Knit Picks cotton/acrylic blend is fine though)
• If I took the time to work hem stitch at each end, I wouldn’t worry about securing edges with zigzag on the sewing machine
• Don’t machine-wash with those long ends… they are a mess!

I am anxious to warp the loom again to see if I can do better.

Also, I still adore the colors I picked for these towels. I should be able to get another set just like them with no problem.