Friendship Towels in Tintes Naturales

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This weaving kit includes all the yarns needed to weave these towels that were designed by Susan Szczotka, Nancy Smothergill, and Judy Fox for Handwoven, Sept/Oct 2018, pages 26–30, 66-67. 

Friendship Towels in Tintes Naturales

Featured in
Handwoven Sept/Oct 2018


Help support the women of Guatemala as you weave these three towel patterns designed with the yarns that were hand dyed by the women of San Rafael, Guatemala.

You'll delight in the brilliant but earthy natural hand dyed colors in shades of cochineal, indigo, osage orange, madder and overdye of osage orange with indigo.

Woven with hand dyed yarns. Each of the three patterns make two towels with a variety of yarns from the Friendship Towels with Tintes Naturales package. The original kit makes four towels so you will have plenty of yarn to weave the two towels in one of the three kits of choice with lots of extra yardage left over! You can put on a 4 1/2 yard warp and use up the remainder of the yarns to weave one or two additional towels. These two extra towels will be random colors however you choose.

Equipment needed: 4-shaft loom; 20" weaving width; 10-dent reed

Choose Your Pattern ~ Choose any one of these 3 towel patterns that produce two towels in twill structure with the yarns from the Tintes Naturales yarn package.

Coat of Many Colors Towels: The towels in this project stuck to the rules of our challenge and contains all eight colors of Tintes Naturales in the warp and two of the colors in the weft.

Tintes Naturales Huck Towels: Woven in a five-thread huck lace pattern using a variety of colors from the Tintes Naturales yarn package.

Colorful Huckaback Towels: Weave a set of two towels in huckaback structure using seven of the eight colors from the Tintes Naturales yarn package.

Yardage in kit:
Warp: 8/2 unmercerized hand dyed cotton (3,360 yd/lb; Mayan Hands Dye Project), Osage Orange/Indigo, Dark Indigo, Osage Orange, Light Cochineal, Light Indigo, Dark Madder, Dark Cochineal, 180 yd each; Natural, 1100 yd.

Weft: 8/2 hand dyed cotton, Osage Orange, 358 yd; Light Cochineal, Dark Cochineal, 332 yd each; Light Indigo, Dark Madder, 496 yd each.

Instructions needed:  Handwoven Sept/Oct 2018 from Long Thread Media.

Note:  This kit includes all yarns needed to weave these towels.  The pattern can be found in the Handwoven magazine noted above.  You will need to purchase this magazine if you don't already own a copy.
Photos by George Boe