A lovely sight!

I longed to finish that dratted towel warp this weekend. I wove whenever I could last week, and spent most of today weaving. Yesterday saw a couple of hours in the morning, before my daughter Shelly came for lunch and with  a project of her own.

She had a tote of quilt squares sewn on paper and the paper needed torn off. These are the very same squares I used to sew for Jan and she would turn into little quilts for children in need. Shelly and I tore off all the paper backings of her stash of squares.

The gist of this story is, now she has Shelly sewing single bed tops and Jan is donating them to a group called Good Knights. This group's mission is to give a bed to children who do not have a bed.

And there are thousands of children here in Northeastern Ohio, who sleep on the floor for want of a bed. The single bed quilt tops Jan is making now go to this project. A bed and a quilt.

I smiled, remembering all the bags of scraps left behind my sewing chair by Jan's quilting customers. I asked Shelly if the quilting customers were still leaving bags of scraps at Jan's studio, and the answer is Yes. She probably will never run out of material for quilts.

But I digress. I really hoped to reach the end of the warp today. I wove an entire tube of the blue, but didn't trust the warp to last for one more tube of blue, so I went to my usual end of warp ploy, cream towels.

And I wove and wove and wove all day today. I did not take off the blue towels because that would involve tying the warp back to the front beam, and wasting many inches. I just kept weaving the cream.

Every time I looked at the back beam, there were still a couple of turns of warp left. Until suddenly one section had just one turn left! It was that wonderful event that happens to weavers on occasion. One bout is short!

The length of towels is still on the beam. I am too tired to take them off and secure the ends. A job for tomorrow afternoon. As soon as they are finished into towels, they will go on the web site and that will be the end of towels.

My next project is much more complex. I can weave a 36" width of fabric on this loom, and that will be my next undertaking. It won't be plain fabric; the surface will be a textured pattern very like the leaves of the Hosta plant named August lily.

This is what is called an overshot pattern. Every row is separated by a row of plain weave, the over and under of potholder weaving. I'll use the rest of the towel colors. I'm looking forward to this, but it will be some time in coming. There will be 18 bouts to wind on and then thread through the heddles!