Sett When Changing from 10/2 to 8/2 Cotton Tea Towels

Question: I am making the Quilt Block Towels using the pattern from Best of Handwoven: Top Ten Towels on Eight Shafts. It calls for 10/2 cotton at 24 epi. I am going to be using 8/2 cotton for the warp and 8/2 Organic cotton for the weft. Do you think I can get away with 20 epi with that or should I go tighter?

I have just seen the pattern for your draft and yes, it is Summer and Winter. All supplementary weft structures like Summer and Winter can be woven balanced. Imagine a piece of balanced plain weave fabric that has a supplementary pattern stitched on top of it which is the Summer & Winter. Normally for a plain weave fabric, we would sett the cotton at 18 -20 epi but because you will also be throwing an extra weft pick in after each tabby pick (the Summer & Winter) …you need to open the sett up to allow both of them to live together. Your squares will be nice squares, not high sky scapers :^)

Hoping to get the loom warped this weekend and will keep you up to date on my progress. Planning on warping it at 18 epi as I was able to reduce the pattern (by using only 4 repeats instead of 5 to keep the towels at a reasonable size) a lot more cleanly than if I have to resort to 16epi. I have included 15 inches of additional warp for trials but hoping I don’t have to re-thread at 16 epi. I am using a sectional beam and if it turns out I need to go down to 16 epi, can I just re-sley the reed at 16 epi without re-beaming (not sure if that is the right word) the whole thing at 16 epi?

It will be okay. You will have a 1” difference on each side but that shouldn’t cause a problem. If you find you can’t square and you don’t want to re-sly you could change your tabby weft to 16/2.