Instructions for Huck Towels
Huck towels are made out of a special type of cotton cloth, called huck toweling. The cloth is special because of the way it is woven. Huck toweling is absorbent and virtually lint free, making great towels for cleaning. This produces slightly raised pairs of threads, at regular intervals, that make the material extra strong and easy to embroider, so much so in fact that most huck towels are embroidered using a technique called Swedish weaving in which the design is visible on the front of the towel but not on the back.
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Instructions
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Making Huck Towels
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Cut the toweling to the length you want if you want to make your own huck towels from scratch. Each edge has a selvage edge, which means it is woven in such a way that it will not unravel when cut. The long ends have to be hemmed, but that is only to secure the edges and thread ends of your work, so it is done after any embroidery. Cut edges can be hemmed or left raw, but they have to be serged or zigzagged in order to prevent raveling. The material is available only in a 15-inch width.
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Wash the huck towel before you embroider it. Huck cloth can shrink quite a bit, so you should pre-wash it before doing hemming or embroidery work.
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Hem or stitch the raw edges and add embroidery if desired.
Embroidering the Towel
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Choose a design for embroidering your huck towel, and select a four-ply worsted weight yarn, such as cotton yarn or baby yarn, using four strands for outlines and designs and one or two strands for finer details.
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Start your design in the middle of cloth, using the middle point of the thread. Traditional huck embroidery, or Swedish weaving, uses threads woven in a design from side to the other. In this type of embroidery, weave from the middle out, and then go back and weave the other side, beginning and ending your thread on the edges only.
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To finish your huck towel, hem the long selvage edges to secure the thread ends.
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Tips & Warnings
You can use whatever type of yarn you want, but cotton yarn is generally more durable.
To vary your embroidery design, change the number of strands you use.
While huck towels are usually embroidered with Swedish weaving, you can embroider your towel however you wish.
Be careful of the yarn you choose. If you use metallic threads, for example, the towel could feel scratchy.
Don't use too much embroidery on the towel. Simple designs not only tend to look better than more elaborate designs, but they also wear better.
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/BananaStock/Getty Images
