Hello friends,

Today I thought I'd share with you a set of tea towels that I made as part of my weaving studies with the Jane Stafford School of Weaving. I'm currently making my way through Season 2 of Jane's course work, which looks at colour and design in weaving. These tea towels are part of the Season 2 Episode 4 Colour and Weave sample, which shows what colour patterns look like with dark and light repeats on a plain basic weave.

My loom is an Ashford 8 shaft jack floor loom, which I bought just over a year ago, and it's been amazing and easy to weave on.

First up we have the full colour and weave sample. The warp is threaded with patterns of dark (D) vs light (L) colours in blocks, for example DLDL or DDL, and each are separated by a small yellow stripe of plain weave, in seven blocks. The weft is then woven in the same pattern as the warp, to give squarish colour blocks, which end up showing a large number of different patterns within one tea towel sample. It's a great way to get a large number of samples in a small amount of space. You can then isolate each block to see which patterns you might be interested in using for a bigger project.

After doing the sampler, I had plenty of warp left over to try longer samples of the patterns I was interested in from the first sample.

In the end I was able to make 5 full length tea towels, which I then scanned using our printer/scanner so that I had copies of each sample before the tea towels went into the wash.

Each of the tea towels, apart from the first full sampler, will be used in the kitchen as tea towels, which is great because we were running low on them. But the first full sampler stays in my weaving folder as a reference weaving sample. I have since labelled both the warp and the weft for easy referencing of each colour block. I plan to use some of the patterns for future work projects for my business Hearth & Oak, where I weave and sew textiles to sell in my online store.

I'm very pleased with this section of work, and now it's time to move onto the next block of course work.

I love learning new techniques in weaving, and Jane Stafford's School of Weaving is a great way to do this at a good price that I can afford. If you are looking to learn to weave, or upgrade your skills, I recommend checking it out.

Have a wonderful day

Julie-Ann

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Tags: 2025, Sampler, Study, Tea Towel, Weaving, Winter