Christmas tea towels 2014

It’s New Year’s Eve already and even though I’ve had a few days off work, I haven’t managed to restore any sort of order at home as I had planned.  I have started shredding the excess meeting papers and now have several large bags of shredded paper, a large pile still to be shredded and small shreds all over the house.  I might as well just keep at it and clean up properly when I’m finished.

I’ve done a little new weaving during the break but wanted to write about this year’s Christmas tea towels first.  A few years ago I started making a run of tea towels for gifts and they seem to be a success because my friends now ask hopefully ‘will there be tea towels this year?’  

This year I started with a summer and winter design from Handwoven May/June 2013, used yarns from the stash, dyed some in solid colours for wefts and randomly for stripes in the warp, put 14 metres on the loom and away I went.

I ended up with 14 towels, all a bit different, some with squares, some with rectangles and almost all with different colour combinations for the tabby and pattern weft. 

When I looked at them on the loom there seemed to be a lot happening, maybe too much, so I decided to stay with the same tie up and treadling.  After the first 6, I inserted a couple of sticks, cut the tea towels off  because I needed them for early presents, tied them back on and kept going.  As a result there isn't a glamour shot of them all posing together, and I think a couple might have missed the camera entirely.

Here's one hanging on the work towel rail showing the back side and the matching ribbon I found in the stash

Overall I was pretty pleased with the results as were the recipients.  Some of the colour combinations worked better than others and 2 towels had obvious faults.  It was one of those patterns where the mistakes didn’t show up that much on the front, 

but were very obvious on the back 

so there are a couple destined for my tea towel pile.  There’s no effect on the drying qualities, it’s just annoying, not easily fixable and simply not worth it for a tea towel.

And look what I found hanging over my fence

It’s from my neighbour’s passion fruit vine so maybe there will be some free fruit to follow and if not, the flowers are amazing and I love to see them appearing over the fence

Helen