TT 820: Kitchen towels in cool colors

I finally finished this quartet of towels that I warped over the Thanksgiving break. The photos could be better, but this is what you get in the winter. This is the time of year when there's very little of that "magic light" that works so well for photographs. Either the sun is out and it's very harsh and direct, or the sun is hidden and everything is washed out and gray. I took these photos in my living room, with all the blinds open, at midday on a very sunny day. Perhaps a different background would have helped. I just used the corner we had just emptied of the Christmas tree.

These are the colors I used, which remind me of cool waters in the summertime. All are 8/2 cotton from Maurice Brassard. The darker blue is vieux bleu, the light green is lime, the light blue is bleu pale, and the teal is teal. I wound a pretty long warp (4.4 yards) and double stranded the yarn in the warp slots and holes. I used a Fibonacci stripe sequence, and I like the asymmetry of it.

For the first towel, I used each of the four colors in a quarter of the weft:

I was very interested in the blues, so for the second towel, I used the light blue for 2/3 of the towel and dark blue for the remaining 1/3:

For the third towel, I used 3 colors in the weft:

And for the final towel, my plan was to use 1 color for 25%, another for 50%, and a third for the remaining 25% - but I ran out of warp before finishing that. You can see that the design looks a little unbalanced.

How big are they? My target (as always) is 17.5"W x 25"L. These came out a little big - they are 18.75" wide and about 26" long (except for the last one, which is only about 22.5" long). I don't like kitchen towels that are too small.

Overall, I got about 14% shrinkage/take-up in length and 14.7% shrinkage/draw-in in width. This is where my confusion begins. I calculated the warp length for 18% shrinkage PLUS 10% take-up, and my weft for 16% shrinkage PLUS 10% draw-in. If I had really lost 28% in length, my towel should have been 21.6" long... yet it was 26". I need to puzzle on this more.

What else did I learn? I have been working on my selvedges. Usually my selvedges are bit tight (especially on the left side), so I tried really hard to be looser there. At the beginning, I was TOO loose - here is the left edge of the first towel. I think that fabric will be weak:

By the end of the warp, I was doing this, which is improved:

I also had a few quadrupled warp threads. (They were supposed to be doubled, so I doubled the doubles.) This happened 3 times. I noticed the first one while weaving the header, and cut it. I noticed the second one about an inch into the hem, and pulled it out. Someone the third one escaped my attention until I was nearly done with the first towel, so I left it in. Now it looks like a seam, or a vein (it's the teal color in the middle):