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“How much can you honestly write about cutting a bunch of yarn?” a friend asked me this week.
I had explained how I planned for this week’s column to be about measuring out the string I needed for my project. She did not think I could write an entire column just about measuring out strings, let alone make it interesting to my readers.
Well, the concept of measuring 162 strings to be more-or-less the same length may seem to some like a process that requires little effort, but it is yet another example of how the majority of weaving has nothing to do with actually operating the loom.
As I explained in last week’s column, these 162 strings were calculated to be the amount needed to produce a finished piece that would be 18 inches wide on my specific loom.
What I did not explain last week was that the shortest string among these 162 will ultimately determine the length of the total project.
Since I am aiming for 51 inches of finished weaving, I must make my strings long enough to allow that much weaving to take place.
The act of weaving is when strings are combined in an over-under-over fashion. Since the strings are no longer just flat, they lose a good bit of their total length during the weaving process. Other factors, such as tying the strings onto the loom itself, also eat up the inches.
When I worked out the math last week, I determined that I would need strings 109 inches long in order to get a finished 51-inch piece with five-inch frills.
To begin measuring my strings, I turned to a tool that my fiance made for me called a warping board. This hand-made wooden frame has a series of pegs sticking out of it.
Professionally constructed warping boards have nice, parallel pegs and cost hundreds of dollars. Mine may be less than perfect, but it gets the job done and was only a fraction of the price.
I grabbed the sage-green yarn and teased the end free of the skein. I then turned to my desk, where I had long ago drawn marks in magic marker to measure out one yard against the edge of the desk without the need for all that pesky measuring for every project.
Again with the math. I used an online conversion tool to tell me that 109 inches was just a hair over three yards in length.
I held my yarn up to the marks on my desk and measured out three lengths. I added about three finger-widths, and pinched the string here. I added one hand-span to the pinched area, and I placed a mark with a sharpie here. Then, on the other end, I did the same.
I chose a peg on the warping board and tied the string to it so the sharpie mark was as close to the peg as I could get it, using the length of the hand-span I had earlier marked off to tie the string.
I crossed the string to a peg on the opposite side, wrapped the string around the outside of it, but did not loop it completely, and spanned the gap again.
Back and forth I went, testing different angles and pegs until I brought my other sharpie mark as close as I could to a peg. When I found the perfect combination of pegs, I tied this end of the string off.
Carefully, I pushed the string down as close to the board as I could, making room on the pegs for the rest of the strings.
One down, 161 to go.
This one string would serve as my guide for all the other strings in the project. I turned to the green yarn once again and tied it to the original peg. I put the skein of yarn down on my desk and began retracing the path laid out by my measured string.
I followed each curve and twist until I came to the final peg. That was one. Instead of tying off the string, I simply looped it around that final peg and started back down the pattern toward the beginning again. Two.
Once I reached the beginning, I simply looped the yarn around the peg and started back in the other direction. My left hand did all of the winding, while my right hand guided the thread that came out of the skein.
My feline assistant, Mari, lounged on my desk and watched her great nemesis, the yarn, zip back and forth along the pegs, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Several times during the process of counting to 80, the string abruptly stopped moving, and I would always look up to find it secured in Mari’s mouth or claws.
It’s good to know that I’m safe from the dangerous yarn, after all. At one point, freeing up the string made me lose count of my loops. This was no problem. All I did was wrap my loose string several times around the next end peg I came to, and then go to the middle of the pattern.
Carefully, I counted the strings there. 63. I then unwound the string from my end peg and continued counting. When I reached 80, I stopped. String number 81 was my original guide string, so it was time to change colors.
I took a moment to squish all of the string bundles down as far as I could to make room for the ivory color. When I was done, I tied on the ivory string, and repeated the process, counting to 81 for it and finishing off my 162 strings for the project.
Join me next week as I take these long loops of yarn off of the warping board without making a horrible mess, and begin to set up the loom for the project!
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Gretchen Richards is a reporter for The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She is a fifth-generation artisan and skilled in multiple art forms.