How A Weaver Makes The Magic! Part 1

Ever wonder how a weaver makes the magic? 

From the Idea to the finished product in 8 steps, maybe 7.

Step 1: What are you gonna make?

That is step one, what do you want to make. So before you even start, go get your calculator. This suggestion is for all of us who break out in a cold sweat at the thought of mental calculations. 

So you decided you wanted to make a scarf. You have this lovely skein/ball of yarn that you need to make into something.  Here are the basic questions you need answers for:

1. How long is this scarf gonna be?
2. How wide do you want it?
3. Do you want fringes on the ends or do you want to hem the end?

This is a very basic list and there are many more considerations but for an example this will do.  So we decide our scarf is going to be 60” long and 6” wide with 5” fringes on the ends.

Step 2: How much yarn do I need?

When you weave there are lengths of yarn/thread that is attached to your loom. This is called warp. You tie all the lengths/warp to one end of your loom and while holding the warp steady and even you wind it onto a roller.  When it is all wound up the other end gets tied to the opposite end of the loom. OK so I am leaving the middle part out but that’s ok for now, we will get to that in a bit.

Yarn comes in all sorts of different thicknesses so we need to find out how many lengths of yarn we will need to fill that 6” we want for the width.  Obviously we will need more warp/lengths of yarn to fill that 6” if we are using a thin yarn and less if we are using a thicker yarn.  

Go find a ruler. Now take the end of the yarn and start wrapping it around the ruler until it covers the width of at least one inch.  Don’t leave any space between the strands and don’t bunch it up or overlap.  Now count how many strands of yarn fit in between that 1 inch space.  For this example we are gonna say we get 5.

We now know we need 5 lengths of yarn/warp for every inch.  We already know we want the scarf to be 6” wide, 5 x 6 = 30.  We will need 30 lengths of yarn/warp to make this project. 

So we now know how many warp threads we need so now how about the length?  We wanted our scarf to be 60” long but remember we also want 5” fringes on each end. 60 + 5 + 5= 70”.  Now we know that each of our warp lengths will need to be 70” long. If you want to know how many yards this is divide by 36” 70/36= 1.94yds so let’s round up to 2 yds.

We have 30 lengths of yarn and each one is 2yds long – 30 x 2 = 60 yds. We will need 60 yards of yarn for the material we tie onto the loom but wait we need more yarn to do the actual weaving with.  We will need approximately the same amount of yarn to do the weaving. This is called the weft! Now 60 (warp) + 60 (weft) = 120 yds total.  Make sure your ball/skein of yarn has at least that amount, more is always better.

Note: There are actually many more considerations for calculating how much materials you need; loom waste, type of pattern, type of loom, shrinkage, etc. but we won’t go too deep here.

Step 3 Measuring your Warp

You need to measure out 60 lengths of yarn for your warp. Each warp needs to be the same length. They can’t be tangled up and need to be in order.

Basically you need to tie the start of your yarn around a post of some sort and then wrap it around another post that is 2 yards away and then back to the beginning.  You will need to do this 30 times. What? You say!  30 times, I thought we needed 60 lengths?  Yes, you do need 60 lengths but remember you started at peg 1 and walked to peg 2 and then back to the starting peg again and that is 2 lengths.

There are all sorts of methods for measuring out your lengths/warp, usually pegs or warping boards.  Our example is fairly short but some projects require hundreds of fine warp 7 yds or more long.  For this other methods are used unless you have a really long house and want to walk miles.

STEPS 4 – 8 CONTINUED

SEE PART 2 OF “HOW A WEAVER MAKES THE MAGIC”