Rustic Southwest Towels

Growing up in southern Arizona, Jodi Ybarra loved rustic décor. Her Rustic Southwest Towels in earth-tone hues represent those rich colors of the desert. Weave up a set and bring the soothing colors of the desert into your home, whether you live in an adobe-style house in the southwest, in the mountains of Colorado, or somewhere beachside.

You may not have learned to weave for the sole purpose of weaving kitchen towels, but there are good reasons why towel patterns are perennial favorites for weavers. Whether you want to coordinate with your kitchen décor, play with color, use up yarn stash, or make a personalized gift, you can put a few yards of warp on the loom and weave a set of handwoven towels in a weekend. Handwoven towels are a joy to weave and they are genuinely useful in the kitchen—if you can bear to actually use them!

Jodi Ybarra’s Rustic Southwest Towels prove that you can weave beautiful towels on a rigid-heddle loom.

One of the most challenging aspects of plain-weave towels is finding an interesting color or stripe pattern. It can be tempting to weave symmetrical stripe or check patterns, but complexity and variations in stripe hue yield a more attractive design. Try combining different colors with yarn wraps to get a few different ideas, and try using the Fibonacci sequence as a starting point.

Unmercerized cotton is the perfect yarn for handwoven towels, because the matte and slightly fuzzy surface absorbs water thirstily. Find these towels today in Easy Weaving with Little Looms 2018.

—Anne Merrow

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Project at a Glance:

EQUIPMENT: Rigid-heddle loom, 14" weaving width; 12-dent heddle; 2 shuttles.

YARNS: 8/2 Unmercerized Cotton (Aurora Earth; Cotton Clouds), in contrasting colors.