Everything But the Kitchen Sink Towels

Did you check out the halvdräll runner in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Handwoven?  I've been eyeing the structure for several years after I received a sample in a Complex Weavers exchange several years ago. After I read the article in Handwoven, I decided to try it out, but with a twist or two.  I have lots of little balls of yarn left over from bobbins (I save everything) and cones of yarn with just a bit on them.  I collected oranges, browns, pinks and a few lavenders for warp yarns and set to work to wind a multi - multi color warp.  It took a bit of planning because the halvdräll threading blocks vary between 9 and 10 threads, so I did a whole thread by thread drawdown and expanded the four shaft draft to eight so that I wouldn't have to reload heddles on the first four shafts of my Baby Wolf.

Once I had gotten the warp on the loom and started weaving, I decided that some of my variegated yarns would be terrific thicker wefts - with so many colors in the warp it made them busier and better (IMHO).  I also pulled out my box of little balls of cotton yarn and started using them up, ball by ball.  The weave structure uses a tabby weft in a finer grist followed by a pattern weft with heavier yarns and I found I could use most medium value colors because there were so many colors already present in the warp.

7/23 Here is an addendum to this post.  The original Handwoven magazine had an error in the threading of the draft on the first page  Obviously it worked, because I used it.  An errata post was made later in the magazine and here is a link to the correct wif file.  https://handwovenmagazine.com/library/55988020

One thing  I found after I had threaded my loom was that I needed a straight draw threading at the beginning and the end of the warp so that the pattern wefts looked good at the selvedges and also so that I could do plain weave hems.

While throwing everything into these towels possible, I ran across a very good cookie recipe with the same name - not halvdräll, but Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cookies from Martha Stewart.  Try them, I think you will find they are as tasty as the towels are colorful.

Here is a P.S. to the post.  A weaving friend asked Madelyn van der Hoogt what the meaning of halvdräll was.  Here is her answer

I'm going to tell you this off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure it captures the gist. Shaft movement in Swedish counterbalance looms is operated by pulleys called dräll pulleys. In some weaves, such as damask and turned twill, all of the shafts in the pulleys operate against each other (I’m not saying this right. Maybe it’s better to say that each block has its own separate shafts, so when you change from one block to the next, you change the operation of both groups of shafts on the pulleys). These are dräll weaves. In halb dräll weaves, the pattern shafts for each block are different, but the tie-down shafts are the same for both blocks. This affects the way the pulley system works; only “half” change their operation from block to block, hence halb dräll.

So, turned twill is a dräll weave. Summer and winter is a halb dräll weave.
Madelyn