About Steve and Kitchen Linen Company
In the fall of 2020 the pandemic was raging on and my mother and I were caregivers for my father who later passed away in 2021. The caregiver support group my mom and I attended at the Veterans Administration Hospital would remind us that caregivers need something in their lives to keep themselves energized for the work they are doing for their loved one. Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube algorithms had been showing me amazing hand woven work done by incredibly creative makers. I remember reading the comments after watching Trish from Fiber Love Diary on YouTube make yet another amazing set of kitchen towels on her rigid heddle loom. Someone in the comments said, “now you’re going to make me buy a loom” — I was thinking the exact same thing.
Rigid heddle loom warped with my first weaving project.
When my Ashford rigid heddle loom arrived my first project was of course a scarf. It was made with great love even if it did have a few float errors. Once it was wrapped for Christmas and on its way to my dear friend in Washington DC I knew kitchen towels would be my next project. After the Maurice Brassard 8/2 cotton arrived from The Woolery I’ll be honest, I was a bit concerned when I saw with my own eyes how it looked almost as thin as sewing thread. By then I had watched a lot of weaving videos on YouTube and I knew I could turn this thread into a kitchen towel. I wove a towel with blue and yellow stripes for the Swedish flag where my maternal grandmother’s family is from Uddevalla. All of a sudden I looked forward to drying dishes!
First hand woven dish towels.
If you are interested in learning to weave or you just want to see how it’s done I strongly suggest you check out Kelly Casanova on YouTube. I have learned so much from her YouTube videos and from her Online Weaving School. Kelly is a great teacher, endlessly creative and brings so much encouragement to her students.
After my dad passed away I had more time to weave. I started to realize that I wanted to weave more complex projects that would required a multi-shaft loom. In my life before caregiving I worked in Information Technology. I was looking to make a change and I started to get a crazy idea that a new loom, and kitchen towels of all things, could be what I was looking for. I love the art, design and color of hand woven textiles. And the math! The more I learned about weaving and textiles the more I realized there was an endless amount to learn.
Kitchen towels being woven on my Ashford 8-shaft table loom.
The book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel is a fascinating look at all aspects of textile production and how cloth has influenced the growth of humanity from business and chemistry to the spread of the alphabet and arithmetic. Even the word technology comes from the Proto-Indo-European root teks which means to weave and is also the origin of the word textile. Charles Babbage, one of the early thinkers in the field which lead to modern computing was influenced by the programmable loom made by Joseph Marie Jacquard which uses punch cards to produce intricate patters in cloth.
The first kitchen towels I designed for Kitchen Linen Company
[Click photo to expand].
As I turn from technology toward weaving I’m amazed how much those two worlds share. I started Kitchen Linen Company because I love making kitchen towels and other hand woven textiles that are beautiful to look at, do their job well and are intended to be used every day. I hope you enjoy them too.