In the Beginning

It amazes me still, even after so many years of weaving and so many projects - how a collection of cones of yarn turns into finished woven cloth. I perform the many little steps of the process which I know so well, but seeing the end product still holds a bit of magic for me.



Today's post focuses on how I start a new project. Over the weekend I measured the warp for a series of towels, breadcloths and other household linens. I'll be using a pattern of my own design and 12 different cotton and cotton/linen blend yarns.

For these yarns, I'll have a sett of 24 threads per inch, which means there will be 24 threads in each inch of my warp. This warp will be 21.7" wide. With a bit of simple math, I found that I'll need 520 warp ends for this project. Each warp thread will be 15 yards long. The planning got a bit trickier here because I wanted to arrange my yarns so that there are mainly tans and khakis at the selvedges, shading through some rusty colors into deeper berries and eggplant at the center. I had only small amounts of some of the yarns, so I started planning at the center and worked out to the selvedges. Doing my calculations from the center out allowed me to adjust the warp thread count according to how much of each color I had.

After I got my color arrangement worked out, I measured the 15 yard warp in bundles or chains of about 80 threads each. Measuring the warp took three and a half hours. Frequent color changes slowed down the measuring process somewhat.

Once the warp was measured, I laid it out in the order it will be arranged in on the loom. My first thought was "Wow, that's a lot of yarn!" Just for fun I decided to do a few more calculations to see how much yarn it was. 520 warp threads at 15 yards each equals 7,800 yards of yarn or almost 4 and a half miles, if you stretched it all out end to end. In addition I estimate that I'll use about 6,000 more yards of yarn for the weft. That makes a total of 13,800 yards or 7.84 miles of yarn for this project. That is a lot of yarn.



From all those miles of yarn I expect to end up with approximately 13 and a half yards of woven cloth. It's amusing to think about that mileage scrunched up into towels or runners, etc. This project is especially satisfying for me because all the yarns came from my weaving stash. Nothing extra will need to be purchased. Hmmm, almost 14,000 yards of stash yarn gobbled up by one project. Might even make a knitter overwhelmed with stash yarn consider coming over to the dark side ...