Tea Towels: 8/4 or 8/2 doubled?
I weave a lot of tea towels. Tea towels are perfect for trying out new patterns and seeing how colours play together. Even if in the end, the pattern didn’t work as hoped, you still have a useable tea towel! I generally use 8/2 cotton doubled, which leads to the question: why use 8/2 instead of 8/4 cotton?
It’s a good question, I could use 8/4…it would be faster to warp and easier to weave as there is no need to double the weft, but I have 4 reasons why I use 8/2 over 8/4.
While warping, I thread the slots and holes. So while I’m warping, I will see 2 threads in each slot and 2 threads in each hole. Each pair of threads is counted as 1 end. Then, after winding, I can tie on and start weaving…I skip the step of taking one end from a slot and moving it to a hole.
2. It’s super easy to have colours with a single or odd number of ends. With 8/2 cotton, to have a single end of colour, I just thread the desired slot or hole and its done! If I was using 8/4 cotton, I would need to do one of 2 things:
a) Tie the colour to the back warping stick, run it through the slot then cut and tie at the warping peg; or:
b) At the threading stage I can rearrange the ends to fit the colour order.
A Log Cabin threaded using 8/4 for example will need the threads rearranged when threading the heddle. However, using 8/2 doubled means I can arrange the threads in order while I warp!
Warping single end stripes can also highlight a pattern.
See the diagonal yellow in the center? This is tracking.
3. Tracking: these are the diagonal lines that appear in your weaving after wet finishing. Everything looks great on the loom, then when the towels come out of the washing machine it is covered in lines. There are various reasons why tracking happens which I am not going to cover today (mostly because I don’t understand the technicalities yet!) but I do not like tracking. It’s a personal preference, if you like tracking, that’s ok! I rarely experience tracking when using 8/2 but it often happens with 8/4.
4. Finally, I just like the feel of 8/2 doubled better than 8/4 single. It might just be my imagination, but I think they feel softer.
Are there disadvantages to using 8/2 over 8/4? Well, it is a little bit harder to wind the weft evenly on your shuttle. And if your tension isn’t tight enough it can be easy to go under only 1 thread instead of the the 2 threads that make up a single end. But over all, I will always choose 8/2 over 8/4!
Want to try some towels with more complex warping patterns? Check these one out. You can click the picture for more info or to purchase the pattern.
