Take One Warp from Thirsty Towels to Silky Wrap

Rebecca Logan was inspired by the colors of autumn for her Stormy Skies Towels and Wrap project in the Fall 2025 issue of* Handwoven. *For long towel warps like this one, she doesn’t just endure all the way to the end—when she needs a change of pace, she switches the weft to silk and weaves a wrap to finish things off. Learn how this combination of weave structure and yarns work together to make for very different end products, and get the free project PDF to try it out.—Handwoven editors

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About the Stormy Skies Design

For the past few autumns, I’ve been lucky enough to spend one week each year on the west coast of Canada, enjoying the November coastline and watching storms roll in over the ocean. The colors of that landscape call to me, and they eventually inspired my palette for this project.

Huck spots are my favorite structure for weaving dish towels, as they give an interesting and absorbent texture and look great in stripes or, even better, when woven as threaded to make plaid. When woven in plaid, you can really see the rounded shapes formed by the shifting of the huck spots during wet-finishing. I find those little spots delightful!

However, lately I’ve been asking for more from my dish towel warps. It’s one thing to weave towel after towel, but it’s quite another to end up with a beautiful wrap as well! After weaving my fill of dish towels, I’ve been finishing off the warp with a wrap using a tussah or bombyx silk weft.

The Stormy Skies Wrap is a lovely way to finish a long warp of dish towels.

For this project, I chose a hand-dyed 20/2 tussah silk from Jane Stafford Textiles on Salt Spring Island, which is also on the west coast of Canada. I’ve seen the landscape that produces these colors and feel the Quarry color best represents the roiling blue-gray skies above the island.

I really like the combination of cotton warp and silk weft. The wrap has the weightiness of cotton, influenced by the drape and sheen of silk. It’s a lovely option for fall days that don’t quite require wool but do call for a bit of something substantial around your neck or shoulders.

Now Make It Your Own

Change up the stripes: For the weft striping sequences in the body of the four mostly solid towels (photo above), choose sections from the warp color order that are symmetrical for best effect and to create little pieces of plaid in each of those four towels. See Step 3 in the project.

Change up the colors: The photo above has wraps showing alternate colorways in 8/2 cotton from Maurice Brassard (from left).

• Navy and lime: Limette pâle, Navy, Vert nil, Limette

• Brights: Mauve pâle, Aqua marine, Navy, Peacock

• Neons: Blanchi, Orange pâle, Orange foncé, Rouge scarlet

• Sea glass: Seaton, Slate, Bleu pâle, Vert nil

• Neutrals: Brun chocolat, Charcoal, Gris foncé, Gris pâle

• As originally woven: Charcoal, Flax, Olive, Slate

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Download the full project for free *from our library here: Stormy Skies Towels & Wrap*. And we’d love to hear how you Make It Your Own!