Stash Busting Towels Redux

These are the stash buster towels.  I have five pairs of colors and I'm lifting the colors alternately in harnesses 1 and 3, then 2 and 4, and I discovered that even when I put the same pairs together in the warp, they will still be different colors when I weave them.  From now on when I do Hit or Miss like this, I'm using an odd number of pairs.

 I'm going to try to illustrate what I mean.  This is all the threads.

Here I've lifted harnesses 2 and 4.

Here I have lifted harnesses 1 and 3.  You can see how raised warp colors change position.  I thought I was going to have a five-block repeat because I was using five pairs of threads, but instead I have a 10-block repeat and the colors appear much more randomly than the towels I have woven in the past with four pairs of threads.  I'm always learning someone new in weaving.

I have been eyeing these cones of yarn for the past couple of weeks and finally decided what order to put in pairs in.  As much as I like red and turquoise together, I talked myself out of and paired the red with orange instead.

After I had started winding the warp sections, I changed my mind and moved them around.  I've decided that each color block is going to be its own bout in the future, in case I change my mind, so I don't have to do this again.

Originally I had placed the two red and orange blocks in the center and realized that simply wasn't going to work.  I like how you can change up your colors when you warp from the front and posted this picture in my Facebook studio page.

Once I had the towels underway I posted again with his picture to show that you can change colors when you're warping from the front.  I'm always pushing the color boundaries but I really felt like I had hit a clinker with these.  I told Ian that I was going to have six towels for my inventory.  When I finished weaving for the day and sat down to look at the computer, I found that the response was very positive and I had a private message, requesting to buy the whole set.  Since then I've been commissioned for another one.

Here's the set of six though in the future, I think I'll make it a set of four.  

Speaking of color, my color cards from Kelbourne Woolens arrived this week.  The gorgeous yarns are a blend of merino wool, baby llama, silk and linen.  Each skein is 545 yards and weighs 100 grams.  I need to calculate how many yards are in a pound so I can figure out the sett.  I get ten skeins from this collection so once I have the sett I'll be able to figure out what kind of yardage I can get.  Oh boy, this is like "If the train leaves the station in Duluth, traveling south at 50 mph...."  Math makes my brain ache.