It started with the stash.

I wanted to weave towels as a gift, and before buying anything new, I went looking through the cotton I already had. Cones came out of cabinets and bins and eventually ended up lined across my kitchen island—naturals, creams, whites, blues, and a deep blue-gray.

This is one of my favorite parts of beginning a weaving project.

Before there is a warp, there is color.

Finding the Palette

Color theory sounds very orderly when you learn it.

There are color wheels and relationships, values and temperatures, complementary colors and analogous colors. All of that knowledge matters. But standing in front of a collection of yarn, the decision becomes much more instinctive.

I wasn't choosing colors from an unlimited palette. I was responding to what I already had.

The warm unbleached cotton changed the blues beside it. The darker blue gave the lighter colors somewhere to settle. Some cones that seemed promising on their own simply didn't belong once they were placed with the others.

So I kept moving them around.

Color isn't an abstract decision. You can put it in your hand. Move it. Put one color beside another and watch both of them change.

Eventually, the palette began to feel right.

Then I needed a structure.

Finding the Draft

I went looking for a weaving draft that would give the towels enough pattern to be interesting without allowing the structure to overpower the colors.

Once I found one I liked, the next question was how to make it mine.

The original draft became a starting point rather than a set of instructions. I began working through the color repeat, deciding how I wanted the borders to behave and figuring out where the dark and unbleached threads should fall.

And then came the numbers.

There are moments in weaving when the romance of cloth gives way rather abruptly to arithmetic.

How many ends?

How many repeats?

How many of each color?

How should the borders be added without disrupting the central repeat?

I worked through the calculations, checked the repeat, changed the borders, discovered a mistake, recalculated, and checked it again.

Eventually, the numbers worked.

And Since I'm Winding a Warp...

Then there was the question of length.

I could put on enough warp for the towels I needed.

Or I could put on nine yards.

Because, really, if I'm going to measure hundreds of individual warp ends, thread the loom, sley the reed, tie everything on and get the loom weaving beautifully, I might as well give myself some room to play.

So nine yards it is.

The first towels have a purpose. They are a gift. Their colors and structure have already been considered.

But somewhere farther down that warp is cloth I haven't decided about yet.

Maybe I'll change the weft.

Maybe the colors will behave differently once they're woven than they did sitting on cones across my kitchen island.

Maybe I'll discover something in the draft that I couldn't see on paper.

That is the part I like best.

I can begin with color theory, a weaving draft and carefully calculated numbers.

But I don't have to know exactly what all nine yards will become.

Sometimes it is enough to make the plan, wind the warp, and leave a little extra room for discovery.

~ Karen