As I enter my fifth year of hosting weave-alongs, I’ve been musing on how we spend our time. Besides generally geeking out on all the things weaving entails, we seem to spend the most time talking about the endlessly fascinating topic of yarn selection, sett, and beat, or what I like to call, the weaver’s …
In A Weaver’s Guide to Yarn I start with sett. Understanding warp density’s effect on cloth is where the rubber meets the road, or in our case, the yarn meets the loom. Sett is the number of warp ends within an inch of the rigid heddle reed. Because rigid-heddle weavers often double up our ends in …
Yarn selection and sett are at the heart of what makes woven cloth great. When pondering the question of sett, fabric design, and yarn substitution, an underused resource by rigid-heddle weavers is a sett chart. A sett chart is a list of yarns described in generic terms, their yardage, and a range of suggested setts. …
There is nothing like browsing through shelves of yarn at shop that speaks weaving, and in particular, rigid-heddle weaving. I live in a small town and the only local yarn available is at Walmart, the local Alpaca farm, and the occasional yarn swap at my local guild. I’m about an hour and a half drive …
This is the wool version of one my most popular posts about the different types of cotton yarns available to weavers and how to select the right yarn for your project. It isn’t as straightforward a telling as it was with cotton and I’m warning you right now it is a long one. Cotton is a …
Yarn is forever, but yarns, sadly, come and go. An overwhelming number of respondents to the last survey I sent out, said that not knowing much about yarn kept them from weaving more. Many weavers mentioned specifically the challenge they have with making yarn substitutions, or that they only have big box stores nearby to shop …
Creating cloth requires both engineering and imagination, but most of all it requires that you play with your materials a lot. Getting to know yarn and how it behaves is learned by conducting lots of experiments. Designing is like a Mad Lib. The basic formula goes something like this: I want to make ____________ (project) …
I’ve noticed that if a pattern calls for cotton yarn most weavers tend to dig into their stash and pull out whatever cotton they have on hand. All cotton yarns are not the same. Depending on their type they can behave differently in the finished cloth. Here is a brief rundown of the kinds of cottons …
Recently a colleague, who works on the knitting side of the craft, asked me what is up with Wraps Per Inch? There appears to be so much misinformation about how to use this measurement. I had such fun answering this question that I thought I’d share some of my thoughts with you. In my …
