Waffle Weave Kitchen Towels 1

As a wedding gift for a friend, I made these waffle weave dishtowels from a kit I purchased at Halcyon Yarn in Bath, ME. I chose the "Country Classic" color scheme. It included the pattern and 4 colors of cotton yarn.

In retrospect, I should have done the tea towel kit, but I don't know what people use tea towels for, and I thought these dish towels would be more useful and a quicker project, because they are smaller. Well, they may be more useful, but quicker? No.

I had never done waffle weave before, so I didn't know how much time it would take to actually warp the loom. It is not so bad once you get going, but the warping is really the hard part of the weaving, as it is not 1234, as in plain weave. Also, it was 20 ends per inch (epi), not 10 as I had been used to weaving, so even if it is not very wide, it is still a lot of threads! I managed to get through it with very few threading errors, which is good because I was running out of time. I ended up hemming them the day before the wedding!

I'm glad I did it, though, as it was a fun project, and I will definitely make some more of these. It really is a good beginner project, once you have done some things in plain weave. Another thing I liked was that you warp the loom with stripes using all 4 colors, then weave one of each towel using only one color in the weft. That way, you get 3 very different-looking towels on the same warp, with a common theme.

The weave structure is very nice. The non-mercerized cotton makes them absorbent.

I will definitely do more of this in the future, now that I have the general idea. Also, weaving with cotton, and a finer thread than I am used to (sport weight) was quite enjoyable.

One caveat...the pattern says to weave an inch or so of "plain weave" at the end of each towel for the hem. I wove what I thought was plain weave (treadling 1&3, 2&4), and looked like plain weave from above, but underneath there were threads that were not caught. It made it much more difficult to hem, as I had to catch up all these loose threads in the hem & tuck them in. I will have to figure out some way around this for next time. I'm pretty sure it was a treadling error, and if I diagram it out, I can find a way to fix this.