Project Design: Winter Holiday Towels

This course has been merged with Weaving for Winter Holidays and expanded on in the new course Weaving for Winter Holidays II.

Over the past several courses we’ve talked about twills, we’ve talked about color palettes, and we’ve gone step by step through the process of planning a small, simple project beginning with a draft. This course pulls all of that together and puts it into play-by-play action.

In Project Design: Winter Holiday Towels, Janet takes you step by step – several times! – through the process she uses to plan a project. The “project” in this case is a set of tea towels of a certain size and using the palettes from Weaving for the Winter Holidays, but the process applies equally well to a rectangle of any sort!

Watch over Janet’s shoulder as she uses the Twill Generator, Draft Editor, and the project planning calculators to create a draft, adjust it to the dimensions required for the project, apply the colors from her chosen palettes, and work out all the weaving math necessary.

This isn’t the polished version of the process you’ve seen in earlier courses, with false starts and missteps removed and only a perfect end result! Instead, you’ll follow along as Janet tries various ideas, discards some in favor of others, tweaks a little here and a bit more there, changes her mind and eventually, finally, comes up with a design that she’s satisfied with. Janet’s running commentary explains in detail each step of what she’s doing and the reasoning behind each choice she makes.

The projects are similar enough that the repetition will help cement the concepts but also varied enough to give you a different perspective on each choice that’s required in the planning process. 

As a bonus, the two final lessons in the course cover

• How to reduce a draft from eight or more shafts down to four or even two
• How to extend a draft from four shafts to eight or more
• How to reimagine the towel projects in several other forms: other towels, blankets, scarves or shawls, table linens, and more.

Before you begin

This course assumes that you’re familiar with the Twill Generator, Draft Editor, and project planning calculators, as well as the content covered in Classic Twills.