Sett - Part 2

At the beginning of last month I posted about Sett.  It's something that's really important to grasp as a new weaver and getting it right comes with practice.  At a workshop with a group of newish weavers we had a really good look at Sett and here are the results:

With a 12" rigid heddle loom (Ashford Knitters Loom) we warped with 32 ends (threads) of J. C. Rennie's lovely Supersoft Lambswool (2/6's).  Each of us had a different rigid heddle; 5 dent per inch (dpi), 7.5 dpi, 10 dpi and 12 dpi; so each warp was a different width, as you can see below:

In the 5 dpi reed, the 32 end warp was 6" wide and ensuring a balance weave - equal numbers of warp ends to weft picks - 32 picks (threads in the weft) were woven to 6" in length.  This was made fairly easy by using a colour and weave pattern in the warp and weft.

On the right the woven swatch has been "finished", that is, crabbed (using a dry cloth with steam iron or a damp cloth with a dry iron) then given a hand hot wash and hand hot rinse and allowed to dry naturally.

The very open weave swatch lost more than 1" all  round after finishing!  We could have finished more and still maintained the soft handle.

The swatch on the right, here, was woven on the 7.5dpi reed and the 32 ends were 4" wide. After finishing, as above, the resulting balance weave swatch was 3 1/2" wide, with a slightly firmer handle, suited to a masculine scarf.

The small swatch on the left was woven on the 10 dpi reed and the 32 ends were 3" wide.  After finishing, as above, the swatch was 2 3/4" all round, with a firm handle, suitable for a blanket.

The 32 ends of this little swatch, were 2.5" in the warp and after finishing like all the previous swatches was 2 3/8" all round.  To obtain the balance weave it had to be beaten very firmly and the resulting swatch would be suitable for upholstery fabric.

One outcome of this exercise was that we found it more difficult to maintain a balanced sett with the widely spaced warp than the close sett warp.  However, once crabbed and washed the resulting swatch looked fine!

I do hope this was useful, please let me know if you have had similar results.

Sett

or How to Work Out Which Yarn to Use with Your Rigid Heddle Loom

I've been asked how to work out whether a yarn is suitable for weaving on a rigid heddle loom and have been trying to explain about wraps to the inch.  I decided it was much better to do this via this blog!

On the right is an image of a yarn wrapped round a stick (this could be a pencil or pen or even straight round the ruler!).  You should see that it's been loosely wound so that the yarn isn't stretched, which would make the yarn narrower and give a false number of wraps.  There are 14 wraps to the inch with this yarn.

If you take a cross section of a balanced plain weave you will see  there are equal numbers of warp thread to weft threads.  So with our 14 wraps every wrap would alternate as either a warp or weft thread, so we can safely say that half the wraps would be warps and half would be wefts.
That would make 7 warps and 7 wefts = 14 wraps.
Therefore with 7 warps (S) we could use a 7.5 epi reed, the nearest in number to our yarn.

If a very open and softly draping shawl was being made we could go for a 5 dent reed or if we wanted firm upholstery fabric we might use a 10 dent reed.   We work this out by taking the wraps number, in this case 14, and divide it by 2 to get the sett for a balanced plain weave, 7 (S) here.  To allow for extra drape we can decrease that number by 5 - 10%, here that would be 0.7 at 10% which is approx. 1 end.  Take this from 7 (S) to give 6 ends, and you will see that the nearest reed is the 5 dent reed.

If you are using a slippery yarn to make a scarf, decrease S by 5% for drape but increase by 20% for slipperiness, a net increase of 15%.
For upholstery fabric increase S by 15 - 20% and beat very hard to obtain a balanced cloth.

I hope this helps!