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Do You Know Huck Toweling? The Old-School Swedish Weaving Technique Gains Popularity

Laurel_Tuohy, member

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Traditional huck toweling patterns are, well, traditional but once you learn the technique you can take the craft anywhere you like. These projects, from Avery Hill, show the simple beauty of the stitches.

Photo: Courtesy of Avery Hill

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Huck Toweling, an old-school Nordic weaving or embroidery technique that gained popularity in the 1940s, is making a comeback among young crafters.

Huck Toweling can refer to the fabric used for the craft, most often Monk's Cloth today, or the actual embroidery technique which is also sometimes called Huck Embroidery. The technique, traditionally  used to embellish hand towels, curtains and other household fabrics, is a surface embroidery technique that requires "floating" floss. "Floating" yarn or floss means that the fibers are woven under the top layers of the fabric but don't penetrate the back or "wrong" side of the fabric.

Though this sounds like painstaking handwork, many advocates find the precision and detail of the small stitches something that relaxes them and allows them to lose themselves into the craft. Once you get into the rhythm of the stitching, projects can be completed quickly since the floss isn't going through the fabric completely.

Here is a how-to on the craft from eHow and a simple free pattern from Avery Hill that would look great on the edge of a towel for your first project.

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Comments (3)

maggieme writes: I leaned swedish weaving or huck toweling in high school and loved it. I tried to find the material and could not for such a long time or find anyone who knew what it was. Glad to see it coming back.
Posted: 9:12 am on May 5th

plainjane60 writes: I've done swedish weaving on huck material for many many years, started back in the 50's and 60's and have taught my daughters and grand-daughters to do it also! We also do it on the monks cloth and make aghgans, it is so much fun!

I'm new to this site, would love to hear of any others who do this as well!

Posted: 12:00 am on December 25th

Omargot writes: I am glad to see some one doing huck embroidery. I used to do it many years ago and thought I should get back. recently I started using the designs in my greeting cards.
It is a dying art. I have a dream of starting an embroidery club and huckk embroidery is one of the the art I would like to introduce.
Posted: 4:58 pm on July 12th

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