A Sett Method and Finished Towels

I know, it has been a while. I have been caught up in the sale of our house and getting ready to move... then, our buyers backed out of the sale so we are back to square one. I am not going to go into the gory details here since I want to focus on weaving but, I might just create a temporary blog as the story is both amusing and frustrating.
I promised a bit on sett* in the previous post so I am going to start out here. There are many ways to determine sett. One common way to to do a wrapping on a ruler. The instructions usually say to place the wraps of the yarn right next to one another as they are in the picture above.

Jane Stafford teaches a slightly different wrapping method that I find makes a lot of sense. Instead of placing the wraps right next to one another, you leave a space, the width of the weft yarn, between the wraps like in this picture above.
With the first method, I got about 20 to 30 ends per inch (epi) for my sett. I got 15 epi with Jane's method. It must be noted here that this only gives you a ballpark figure or starting point. Sampling the sett is the best way to go.
This wrap is for plain weave. If I were to weave a 2/2 twill I would wrap two yarns next to one another and leave a space two yarns wide. If you are an experienced weaver, think about it, it will probably make sense. I am not going to go into great detail on this blog but I will say I got a nice sett for my towels.
This was a quick project and I didn't sample but just wove the towels at 15 epi. It was a good sett as the towels have a lovely hand and drape yet are not sleazy.

Here is the first towel on the right. As I mentioned in the previous post, in my haste to get a picture of it on the loom, I forgot to border the horizontal stripe with the yellow. If you look in the square where the two stripe meet, you can see the color and weave pattern that I was after.












The second towel here has the horizontal stripe bordered by the yellow. I like that much better.













I thought I wouldn't have enough of the light blue to use for the weft for a full length of the towels but it turns out I did so I wove the third towel with alternating light and dark blue picks. I put two thin stripes of yellow one third and two thirds along the towel to give it some interest. The color and weave stripe runs the whole length of the towel and seems to "pop" or look almost three dimensional. Over all I am quite pleased with the project.

The final picture is a sample I wove with the little bit remaining at the end of the warp. I tried different combinations of light and dark weft to get different color-and-weave effects in the squares.

The final measurements for towels when washed and hemmed were 17 inches wide by 23 inches long. That was from a 20x30 inch warp on the loom.
So, what next? I dug into my dwindling stash and pulled out a cone of greyish-green Zepher yarn. It is half silk, half wool and is a 24/2 yarn. I am going to weave a fabric with it. I will have all the details of that project in the next post!
Good weaving to all, -Renee

* See glossary