A finished linen kitchen towel, woven pretty quickly for a birthday gift, and then I let it sit around for a week or longer before deciding today to finish it with a hem, wash & dry, and ironing.

It is very rustic and open weave as far as table linens go, and it is definitely going to need another twenty washings & dryings before it feels like a proper tea towel, but that is the fun part, experiencing the transformation of the linen.

♣   Weaving Notes  ♣ 

• Using Bockens Lingarn 16/2 linen (100% linen) for both warp and weft, and I used my 15 dent reed. The listed sett (epi, warp threads per inch) for this yarn is 20-24 epi,  and I got about 16 epi, and 14 ppi (weft threads per inch) of 14.  Still not perfectly balanced, and looser weave than I wanted it to be. The dilemma is from the stiffness of the linen I suspect, and 100% linen is never easy to work with at any stage of the plant-to-cloth process, but I am motivated to figure it out because I love linen!
• Warped 1 in the heddle hole, and 1 in the dent slot, with 1 extra thread in the first and last 2 selvedge warp threads.
• Color: 12 golden bleach, alternating stripes of 4 dark gold and 4 light gold, with weft as white.
• I have been packing in the weft with the stich shuttle which is longer by about 10 inches than the weaving width, using it a bit like the sword of a backstrap loom, because I don’t want to stress the plastic rigid heddle reeds pushing too hard to tighten the weave up.
•  I forgot to take measurements of the finished piece, after wet-finishing (washing & drying) which I am guessing to be 16″ by 28″, before shrinking much, will probably eventually shrink to about 15″ x 26″ , with epi around 18.
• Improvements for next time: With this yarn I think I would like a tighter weave, as it lists recommended 20-24 epi for sett. (At this stage in my weaving, I don’t know if listed sett is for how the fabric sits on the loom, or relaxes after taken off and wet-finished, or if it needs to be specified.) Tightly woven table and kitchen linens on a rigid heddle loom may just take some experimentation. To compensate for the openness of the weave, I used my stick shuttle to really press ( beat ) the weft in, and still I am not getting ppi as high as the epi, so wondering how I can tighten up the weave.  One way I want to experiment in getting a tighter balanced weave for this yarn is doubling up on the reeds, threading through two 10 or 12 dent reeds and attempt to get 20-24 epi, for a tighter warp sett/epi, but I don’t think I could get the same for the ppi (wefts per inch). I believe it may be the nature of rigid heddle weaving to have some difficulty in creating a balanced tight weave, as one can easily achieve on a floor loom with a much heavier beating of the steel reed. 
• Also I think next time I will waste less warp on a hemmed piece if I lash the end knots to the sticks instead of tying the warp ends to the stick. For some reason the rigid heddle instruction book shows this method of tying the warp to the sticks, which I believe is intended for a fringed finish, but I think I’m ready to learn a better way for weaving for pieces intended to be hem finished, especially for expensive or handspun yarn.