Back in the beginning, I made 4 tea towels and gave them away as Christmas presents (Project 1). The 4th was a little short as I ran out of warp length. However, the friend that I gave it to recently told me that it makes a great face cloth. This gave me the idea of making many face cloths in a single warp. I have been trying to think of a wonderful, yet simple, project that would use up a lot of the 5/2 cotton remaining from my early projects and also give me many wonderful Christmas gifts that would be ready by the end of the year – this will be that project!

As in any project, the first step is to calculate the quantities of warp and weft yarn required. I started out doing the calculations in my weaving notebook, but ended up with a snarl of decimal places and different units of measurement, so decided to create a spreadsheet that I can use for all future weaving projects. Once reason for doing this is that reeds are measured “dents per inch” while I weave in metrics. It is endlessly confusing trying to switch between the two, so developing a spreadsheet that does the necessary conversations for me will make things much simpler! So here is a screenshot of my yarn calculations in my spreadsheet.

The yarn I will use for the warp and weft for this project is Ashford 100% mercerised cotton Ne 5/2.
Weft will be Scuba blue (light blue), Chilli pepper (red), Dazzling blue (dark blue), Radiant orchid (purplish), Freesia (yellow) and Green glow (light green).
Warp will be stripes of Twilight grey and Fog (cream). As you can see in the photo below, I have used almost all of each of these colours on this project.

When I was preparing to wind the warp, I looked in my weaving notebook without realising that I hadn’t actually copied the yarn requirements across. So I wound the warp using my initial paper calculations – 200 warps with a length of 9.5m. I decided to wind the warp in several small bundles for two reasons – so that I can make stripes of grey and cream, and also to see if it’s easier to thread the loom using several small warp bundles rather than a single huge one. Initially I wound grey into three bundles of 20 ends and one of 32 (I didn’t have enough yarn to do anymore grey). Cream was wound into 3 bundles of 20 and one each of 40 and 12 ends. That gave me a total of 204 warp ends that are 9.5m long.
What I really wanted was 224 warps of 8.2m. So I wound another bundle of 20 cream warp ends. The extra length means that I may end up with a few extra face cloths!

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