Committing Handtowels: Means, Method, Opportunity

I haven’t forgotten about my Pics to Picks challenge, but this isn’t it.

Momentum is a big concept for me.  If I lose it, I’m sunk.  Which is why, instead of deciding on a draft and making a winding plan for the foundation of my Pics to Picks project, I went ahead and wound this warp I’d already planned for towels, and am now in the process of sleying it.  The towels were going to be my first warp on the table loom, until I decided it would be wiser to start with the simple runner in my last post.  I was afraid that if I started my Pics to Picks warp before this one, I might forget my interpretative schema for all those scribbly notes I made.

Coming over the back beam, the stripes look like fabric for a Sultan’s pantaloons.  Actually, they are a re-working of a draft for fine linen handtowels in a 1986 issue of Väv Magasinet.  I don’t have weaving software, and my brain is bleary lately, so these things tend to take me days to figure out.

The towels for are for my aunt.  Recently, she remodeled her dark, barely-functional plywood mineshaft of a kitchen into something astounding–contracting all the workers and making all the plans herself, including the shape and position of a geometrical celestory window that completely transformed the room.

This is the Auntie Aesthete who got my favorite rigid heddle scarf.  Last time I visited her, she showed me the little abstract guache painting she wanted to use as plan for a mural on the high wall by her new kitchen window.  When I saw it, my color memory filed it away.  Later I realized that I had some leftover cottolin in some of the same hues as the painting.  And, just like the opaque layered colors of guache interacted in the fabulous little painting (yellow on top of red-orange and umber, particularly, for a halo effect), I could make the cottolin colors interact in stripes.  Then I could give her the towels as an encouragement to go ahead and paint the mural.

I only had enough thread for two towels, and they aren’t going to be as big as I like (I like BIG kitchen towels), but I think they are going to be interesting.  The weft is a sort of putty brown cotton.  The colors will be toned down quite a bit from what you see here.