Handwoven Cotton Tea Towels

I have decided that handwoven tea towels is my new favorite thing to weave. If you have dipped your toe into weaving projects, you’ve probably made a few scarves—but have you tried making towels? Tea towels are easy to come by at stores, but a good one that’s absorbent and looks nice might set you back $10. Cotton yarn is relatively cheap and available in a variety of colors (sure, perhaps not in as many colors as we find for wool/silk) and you might be able to make two towels for the same price. The selling feature isn’t the cheap price; I think it resides in the wonderful material qualities of a handwoven towel.

I made two tea towels for about $10 when I was at a weaving workshop at the guild back in late 2017. We followed a series of exercises devised by our teacher, Wendy, to explore the ways we can alternate colors to create interesting patterns. As many of you know, I struggle with anything intricate (eg, lace, colorwork) or requires me to me to be random. Having a method to follow in a sequence (pattern block A, pattern block B…) was great and my towels don’t look too boring. Note: if you want the pattern exercises I followed to make your own sample towels, let me know and I can see about getting permission to publish them.

Aside from the simplicity of the pattern and ease of weaving in tabby, they have held up very well. At first, I was skeptical that they’d last and I did treat them differently as compared to my store-bought towels. After a few months and a few washes, I stopped caring because they held up very well! Two and a half years later, they still look great despite a few spots where the yarns are starting to fray. The fringe, which I was certain would start to fall apart after a few washes, has held together very well too. Overall, I am very please with the result and I hope that I have inspired others to pursue making handwoven tea towels.

Long-handled combs

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Have you ever read a description of something and wondered, “Is that really how they worked?” Curiosity really intrigued me when I began researching the so-called ‘weaving’ combs for my thesis project. They have been a consistent feature in the British Iron Age textile tool assemblage. When I first embarked on my PhD project, I was mainly focused on loomweights and spindle whorls because, as a maker, I was fairly confident that these tools were part of the textile production sequence. But these combs seemed a bit of out place with warp-weighted loom technology. Though I had my doubts regarding their utility, I placed them out of mind until I had made headway on my overall research project. I focused on building up my database of textile tools and gauging how much data I would need to adequately work on the project. I also worked on experiments to begin satisfying my need to understand the physicality of the tools. After the conclusion of my first year researching, I felt it was time to take a look at the combs.

A long-handled comb from Danebury hillfort, UK. This comb has been burned.

Year 2 could be characterized as the year I spent trying to figure out the purpose of these tools by considering the history of their research. Conducting a ‘literature review’ (ie, you read what others have said about some topic and you write about it in an abbreviated essay/chapter) is a fairly recent requirement for research projects these days but I had never felt the true value of such an endeavor until I started reading what others had said about long-handled combs. After seeing the combs in person and examining them under a microscope, I was hooked. I had to learn more and I had to determine a sensible way to examine their functional attributes, beyond their decoration.

Year 3 could be understood as the year of advancing boundaries and seriously critiquing what we know about all the textile tools (loomweights, spindle whorls, long-handled combs, and needles). After a second viewing of these textile tools, I wrote four extensive chapters on the textile tools and still I was unsure what to do about these combs. In a twist, I was able to see them again for a third time. It’s amazing what an extensive literature review and the gestation of thoughts can do for a scholar trying to figure out how to figure something out. I’d like to consider myself an archaeological engineer in a sense because I am presented with something which has an unknown purpose and I’ve been asked to uncover its function. Using applied methods, engineers can take a prototype and create a working version; experimental archaeology affords archaeology a similar option.

Of course, experimentation is always problematic in archaeology because we deal with many unknowns, including how societies interpreted this technology and how they utilized it. Academic research is very slow, but I am beginning to realize that it needs to be slow. Just like how my craft knowledge took several years to develop, my sense of understanding archaeological problems takes time. If you look at my conference and publishing record, I have committed the majority of my research time to long-handled combs and explaining the issues surrounding their interpretation. Keeping my discussion of these combs in balance to the other textile tools I study has sometimes been very hard because I am adamant about not privileging one tool type over the others.

Studying the archaeological record and seeking out the voices, gestures, and intentions captured within each object fuels my need to research. I will keep an open mind as I go.