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.
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