Working Out a Weaving Obsession

The towels that Susan Horton writes about here inspired Andrea Williams to design her Beach House Bread Cloths for the Summer 2025 issue of* Handwoven. *In that project, Andrea suggests a broad range of ideas for further exploration. Does the idea of twill stripes floating above a plain weave background set your mind spinning, too?—Handwoven editors

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I’ve noticed that many weavers have favorite weave structures, which they revisit again and again. I believe some of them are working out a design problem that their brain won’t let go. I understand that feeling—I, too, get stuck on ideas and have to work them out as I design and weave. Once I figure out the solution and see the results, I'm released from that obsession, and I can move on to the next one.

In 2018, I participated in the Handweavers Guild of America’s towel exchange at Convergence in Reno, Nevada. Participating meant weaving five towels of a specific size and taking them to exchange for five towels woven by other participants. Believe me, I didn’t need any more handwoven towels, but they are my happy pleasure.

For my towels, I used a draft from Winning Towels by Karen Tenney as my guide. I designed randomly spaced raised twill stripes with plain-weave stripes in the reed and then (tediously!) recorded them in a draft. They were great stash busters—I used nine colors of 8/2 cotton. I loved those towels and was sorry I hadn’t woven six so that I’d have one left for myself.

In case you’d like to weave your own version, here is a free download of the pattern.

Not Quite Over It

I thought I was done with the idea of raised twill stripes on a plain-weave background—until one day as I was smoothing out a tablecloth, I noticed that it had plain-weave stripes with raised twill, but the colors were arranged differently, and the pattern repeated. Some of the colored warp stripes spanned both twill and plain weave areas, adding yet another layer of visual interest.

At the time, I was planning to weave napkins using 10/2 cotton following basically the same recipe as the towels I’d woven for the exchange, but this tablecloth made me rethink my design. I ended up weaving the version you see below, which has a repeating pattern with wider warp stripes that extend across both plain weave and twill areas.

A napkin with raised twill stripes and plain-weave stripes in a repeating pattern. Note how the colors of the twill stripes bleed into the plain-weave areas. Photo by Matt Graves

Now I think I'm finally ready to let go of the idea of raised twill in a plain-weave background. On to my next weaving obsession!

Weave well,
Susan

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Original published Feb. 13, 2020; updated May 7, 2025