towels

How many times have you heard “wash your hands” in the past few weeks? I’m guessing it’s a lot! I thought it would be the perfect time to offer a free project for us all to enjoy together.

Let’s face it, if we’re going to constantly wash our hands, we might as well have beautiful, hand woven towels to dry them with! I chose bright and cheery colours to increase their aesthetic appeal. I hope that weaving these towels is fun for you and that using them to dry your hands makes you happy.

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This project is suitable for beginners, however you do need to know how to warp, thread, and set up your rigid heddle loom for plain weave. If you don’t feel you are at that level just yet, I highly recommend my Woe to Go! Beginner Rigid Heddle Weaving class.

Both towel designs are quite adaptable and can be varied in many ways. I give you some ideas on how to go about this in the video class.

We’ll begin by going over some of the tools and materials you will need to complete this project:

*Rigid heddle loom 24” weaving width or wider (yes, you can also use a smaller loom with the understanding that your towels will be narrower than mine).

*1 x 10 dent heddle (or a 7.5 – 8 dent heddle if using Sugar n Cream yarn)

*3 stick shuttles longer than the width of the project. (For the first towel we are weaving with 3 weft colours).

*1 pickup stick longer than the width of the project (additional pick up stick to aid transfer of pick up is optional – a stick shuttle can be substituted.

*Reed and threading hook

*A sewing machine and serger are very handy for hemming but not essential

I used a beautifully soft and lofty cotton to weave these towels on my rigid heddle loom. We will be using the same warp for both towels, but as you can see, using different techniques makes the towels wonderfully varied in how they look.

If you’re in Australia, my yarns were from Bendigo Woollen Mills in the following: Pomegranate, Peacock and White cotton 10ply. But, if you need substitutes, here are my recommendations:

Sugar n Cream in red

Sugar n Cream in white

Sugar n Cream in aquamarine

I Love this Cotton

Knit Picks Dishie

Make sure you download the printable PDF, which gives you all the necessary warp calculations, weaving and pick up sequences.

Wash-your-hands-towels-1 Download

Both towels are woven on the one warp but are quite different in appearance. The first towel uses the same colour sequence to weave as the warp set up, giving us a fabulous plaid.

I chose this design because I have so many weavers ask how to deal with the changing of colours in the weft. This is the perfect opportunity to practice the technique of frequent colour changes by cutting and starting new colours.

I chose to weave 4 picks of each colour and to cut each colour to introduce the new one. But, if I decided to weave, say, 2 picks of each colour, I would likely choose to carry the colours up the side rather than cutting them.

Towel two is woven with just white in the weft.

I started and finished with a plain weave border, with the mid section being woven in a simple but lovely pick up design. If you haven’t used pick up sticks before, you may want to start with this post and video to better understand the process and get you set up to weave this towel. I kept the design and weave sequence as simple as I could so that newbies could have a go.

So, are you ready to watch and weave? Here are the videos that, together with the printable PDF will have you up and weaving these beautiful towels in no time at all:

This free class is also available at my Online Weaving School.

If you complete this project, I would love to see and hear about them. If you tag me on Instagram, I will share your project in my stories. And, if you enjoy the project, please share the videos so that others can benefit too!

If you have any questions or comments, let me know down below, I love to hear from you.

Until next time…

Happy Weaving!

It’s bound to happen. That moment when you realise there is a little or large or even gaping hole in one of your hand wovens.

I love using my hand woven towels in the kitchen. I mean, if you’re spending a lot of time doing menial tasks ie. dishes, you might as well be doing it with something special and beautiful.

We don’t have a dishwasher, and with 6 family members we tend to wash and dry a lot of dishes every day.

The first time it happened, I may have gasped, my eyes may have goggled a little and my head may have drooped. Just for a moment. But, one thing you learn through being a parent is to not be too precious about your material possessions. It’s likely they will get broken or damaged at some point. I would still rather use things than have them sit in a drawer somewhere.

Towel 1 was the worst with one large hole and one small hole.

So, anyway, two of my not very old, fairly recently finished hand woven towels had, shall we diplomatically say, “person inflicted holes”? Likely pierced by a sharp knife in the act of drying it?

I began contemplating what could be done about the said holes and I thought of the wonderful old art of darning, something our Grandmother’s did all the time and my own mother avoided like the plague. Needless to say, this art was not passed on to me. But, since having children, I’ve done my fair share of mending clothes with usually passable results.

Towel 2 was in better shape with just one smaller hole.

The trick with handwovens is to try to trace the original path that the broken or snapped threads took. Easier to do if you have a good understanding of the weave structure you used, but you can still get on alright by observing the threads that are still intact.

Once you’ve observed the pattern of the threads and determined how many warp threads and how many weft threads are broken, you can start tracking where these threads should have been and try to follow their original path.

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Using a needle (I used a tapestry needle) and matching the original threads as closely as possible, (I wasn’t able to do this as I had run out of the original threads, but I found some pretty good matches amongst my stash) start your thread 1 -2 inches out from the hole. Doing this also usually allows you to follow the path of the original thread up until it reaches the hole where it is broken.

It doesn’t matter whether you start weaving in warp of weft threads first. After you have woven through and past the hole (hopefully in a pattern very similar to the one that was broken) you continue to follow the pattern with the needle for another inch or two out the other side. Leave tails hanging out from where you began and finished.

This technique worked really well for my smaller holes. Although I didn’t get an exact copy of the original pattern, I was able to replace the broken threads in a way that didn’t look terrible!

For the gaping hole I needed to try something else. Subtle mending was not going to suffice for this one, there were many severed warp and weft threads and the gap was wide. I tried. I really did. But it was ugly – perhaps uglier than before I started trying to replace the threads.

At this point I decided to embrace the “Visible Mending” movement. I didn’t have any matching fabric, having woven just this one towel with those particular threads and structure. I hunted in my scraps and samples pile and came out with a couple of pieces that were acceptable – at least they had the same colours!

I cut out the patch sizes I needed – one for each side of the hole and serged the borders of each piece. I used the wonderful sewer’s helper Heat n Bond to attach a patch to either side of the hole. When cool, I machine zigzagged around the edges. Not perfect, but at least I don’t have to look at my botched mending job anymore and the towel is functional in my kitchen once again!

Once I completed the surgeries, I put the towels through a hot (60 degrees celsius) machine wash, dried and ironed. I cut all the tails (including the original leftover broken threads) as close to the fabric as possible, without cutting the actual fabric. Don’t accidentally snip too close and undo all your hard work!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m very grateful to have children who wash and dry dishes for me, even if there are occasional accidents!

Until next time….

Happy Weaving!

Wash Your Hands! Towels Free Project

Darn it! Mending hand woven towels.