After my eye-blistering warp-faced stripes project, I decided to tone it down and go with white on white for the textured warp and weft section of Mary Black. (I'm working through the problems in Mary Black's New Key to Weaving).
The warp is made up of one-inch sections of 10/2 cotton and a 24 wpi acrylic flake yarn that a friend had given me. The sett on the 10/2 sections was 24 and 12 on the sections with the flake yarn.
As I was weaving, the thought came to me that it was probably a bad idea to mix these two yarns and I might be in for some trouble. Luckily the warp stayed at a fairly even tension and I was able to weave off all four towels that I had planned for. However, whenever I loosened the tension on the warp and when I took the cloth off the loom the cloth was very puckered. The 10/2 cotton sections were tighter than the flake sections, causing the flake section to pucker. Since the flake sections are acrylic, I thought I might have a wet-finishing disaster (opps, learning experience) on my hands as the 10/2 cotton shrunk more and got even tighter against the acrylic flake.
I got lucky again, and it looks like the acrylic drew up more than the 10/2 cotton (didn't expect that at all) and reduced the amount of puckering instead of making it worse.
The four different towels started at 19" in the reed and ended up at:
1. All 10/2 weft (shell white and green towels) - 16". (16% shrinkage)
2. All acrylic flake weft - 14". (26% shrinkage)
3. Mixed 10/2 and flake weft - 15". (21% shrinkage)
The acrylic yarn makes these towels very soft and probably not very absorbent. I've found Perle cotton to be very absorbent after about 3 or 4 washings...maybe when all the mercerizing washes out.
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