Be Our Guest Hand Towels PDF + WIF

Designer Jennifer E. Kwong originally planned to weave a matching pair of towels using a tube of rusty red chenille she’d found at a thrift store, but she finds it incredibly boring to weave duplicates. So she set herself a challenge: Weave a second towel that looks radically different from the first, while sticking to the issue’s color palette and working only from her stash (no time for shopping!).

Because the first design (in plain weave) used dark, saturated colors and dominant horizontal stripes, she decided that the second towel would use light, unsaturated colors and feature vertical stripes. Rather than adding a supplemental warp for those stripes, she settled on creating the illusion of vertical stripes using summer and winter with a dukagång treadling.

Though she had very little experience with chenille, she found that it worked well enough as plain-weave weft stripes in the first towel. For the second towel, she decided to use summer and winter because of its short floats, but the chenille in her washed sample wormed. Oh well. This is why we sample!

Instead of the chenille, she chose 8/4 cotton for the pattern weft in the second towel, and found that it produced a thick yet flexible and absorbent fabric—perfect for a hand towel. You can weave a matching pair of either version, or follow Jennifer’s lead and weave two towels from the same warp that look very different from each other.

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Visit our help article for more information on WIFs, including what they are and how to use them.