These towels are my first attempt at weaving text on my 16 harness Ashford table loom. I used 8/2 unmercerized cotton sett at 20 ends per inch. I had doubts about setting this yarn at 20epi. The structure used is 3/1 and 1/3 broken twill, and the resulting weight and hand of the fabric is thin. Not anywhere near the beefy feel of my Turned Taqueté towels which are sett at 24epi. But the design dictated the sett, and I really wanted to try the design out, so I just went ahead with it.

The colors are shades of blue in a kind of ombré effect, but they are pretty unsaturated in these quick iphone pictures. The text on the left mirrors the text on the right, as depicted in the drawdown below. I wove the towels as you see in the drawdown, and the upside down letters wove right side up. Magic!

Weaving text with 16 harnesses using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements for designing with pattern presets is tricky but doable. As woven here, the font images are barely readable. Because, with 16 harnesses, the design grid in the liftplan can only be 16 squares across. Four of those squares are dedicated to background structure. Thus, 12 squares are left for the actual font, and take up harnesses 16 to 5 in the threading. That’s only a little over half an inch, .6″ to be exact.

It doesn’t get better if I go to 24 epi. Then the font goes down to .5″. So, rather than adjust the sett, my next move is to go to a thicker yarn and keep the sett at 20. I will go to 6/2 unmercerized cotton. And see how it goes.

I’m going to have an awful lot of “Kitchen Towels”!