Fruitful weeks

The tea towel warp is off the Newcomb. I will be washing tea towels and then putting them in the "to do" bin (the back of my couch) until I can get them hemmed. They turned out very nicely. This warp was a mixture of 8/2 and 10/2 cotton in broad stripes of two shades of blue with a smaller stripe in between. The smaller stripe has 2 navy blue threads, then some red, some whites, then red and navy blue again. I wanted to make the smaller stripes a different texture, too, so used the 8/2 in white, and added a heavily textured nubby yard for a couple threads in the middle. Because I was warping 20 epi, which is about right for the 8/2, (it's plain weave) it crowded the larger threads. That, plus using the nubby yarn, gives a nice texture to the small stripe.

The red, white and blue color scheme has patriotic overtones, but you have to look for them, as the colors are not in equal value. Thanks to Gloria for requesting it.

My sewing machine is back and running smoothly after a pricey fix. I would not have put the money into just any machine, but this old Singer 401A is one of the few machines that will do the heavy sewing I require.

Mowing the grass last night, again, I discovered two of my apple trees are ready and dropping fruit. One more, the one I pruned last winter (I didn't know I had THREE!), is groaning with apples, but they're not quite ready. After I finished mowing, I went back out and picked up apples, picked strawberries, and found a few peaches. I scarfed the peaches down in short time, cleaned and froze the strawberries, and cut about a peck of apples up and made sauce. So, it's fruit time! Yeah! The apples look so pretty on the tree, with a pink blush darkening to red, superimposed on the background of green leaves with a little gray bark. I think there's a future warp in those colors.
My very first paid job was sorting fruit for an orchard down the road. It was hot and hard work, but when the peaches came in, it was olfactory heaven. I saved out the biggest, most beautiful peach that came through to eat on break. Of course, this chosen peach kept getting switched out as I found yet another, more beautiful, bigger one. It took just a couple days until I figured out the the biggest, prettiest peach is not necessarily the best tasting. After that I looked for overall ripeness, preferably with some blemishes where it was very ripe: a Number 2 peach in the grading system. What a good lesson!

Back to weaving, I have already started winding the next warp for the Newcomb: more tea towels, this time in a twill pattern. Natural (off white) background with 8 different colors stripes across the warp.

Here's photo of the red, white and blue textured towels.