Last Christmas we gave dish-towels to the siblings (one per family) and scarves to nieces and nephews. It was done while I was working at Amazon, and on two looms with mostly 'stash' fibre. This year will be different:
a) I'm starting early!!
b) everyone will get dish-towels, including sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, one per household again.
c) I've bought the cotton yarn which was an 'odd lot' from R&M yarns.
Based on the success of the huck lace towel design last year, I spent several hours this morning planning a new design for this year. I'm using, once again, some red and green stripes and diamonds of huck lace in a grid pattern. Even with software it took a few attempts to get something that would work with the amount of cotton I had. Once designed I refined the initial calculations and was able work out how much cotton yarn to dye in the two colors for both warp and weft.
Then after a quick trip to the shop to get some non-iodized salt I began the dyeing. It's about an hour and a half per colour including clean up. The green is into the final 30 minute soak after the addition of the soda ash fixer to the Fiber Reactive Dye (from Dharma Trading). I'm using Fire Red and Forest Green this year which may not be exactly the same as last year, but I had these colours already.
The red is rinsed and as soon as the green is too I'll give them a wash with some Dharma Professional Textile Detergent then rinse and hang to dry. I should be able to begin warping in a couple of days. Given the number of towels to weave I'll be doing it in two equal lots.
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