Sunday, March 9, 2014

Dish Towel Samples: Part 1

I see that is has been two years since I posted anything...I've been weaving and knitting during that time but doing a whole lot of other stuff too!

My weaving guild has a study group this year that is doing a dish towel exchange.  I joined mainly because I wanted to get a cool dish towel  and because I already had a finger tip towel warp threaded through the reed (but not the heddles) on my big loom – it’s been sitting there for about a year.  Sometimes life’s events just get in the way of threading heddles.

The warp is 8/2 cotton in a mix of green shades.  I had to add more warp threads to each side to get it to a dish towel width but that was easy to do. But I used up about all the greens that I had.

Undecided about what colors to use in the weft, I asked on Ravelry’s Warped Weavers Marketplace forum for small samples of greens and purples…7 weavers were kind enough to send me more than 20 different shades of 8/2 with just one duplicate.  They also sent some other colors in different weights.  I really appreciated this as it will let me decide what color combinations work best before investing in spools of cotton.

Today I transferred all the samples to bobbins, closed my eyes and picked 7 bobbins for my first sample, numbering the bobbins as I pulled them from the basket.  To get the weft color order, I used a permutation generator for 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 which gave me thousands of permutations.  I picked 15 permutations  at random from the list.  Then using an Excel spreadsheet I matched the permutations to part of the Fibonacci sequence of 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,13,8,5,3,2,1.

And that’s as far as I got today.  Still threading heddles!  I hope to finish and tie on this week.  My first sample will be in a waffle weave.  Below are the 8/2 cotton samples my Ravelry friends shared with me.



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