In this shop we believe that classic and essential materials that are every day workhorse yarns should still be both luxurious and accessibly priced.
However, we also stock some of the most rare and precious yarns in the world, like SilverSpun® Silk and Sea Island cotton. To use these as weft or in knitting, there is very little waste, but if you warp with these yarns you need to factor in loom waste and this can add to your costs, which can be simply not possible, or is undesirable. And no matter what you’re using you may want to control material costs, so some of these may just be useful for general weaving! For people who weave to sell, these might not be useful, as your time may cost you more than the loom waste, but for others they’ll be simple ways to get a little bit more mileage out of their warps. .
So without further ado, here are 3 ways to keep a check on material costs:
1. Tie on your warp
- This is keeping the previous warp sleyed and threaded, and then cutting and tying, for example in an overhand knot in bunches, behind the heddles. You beam a new warp and then go through and tie each new warp end to an old one.
- This has the added benefit of not having to thread again!
- It also means that there is no header waste yarn. You can go straight to weaving from where the knots finish.
2. Use a dummy warp
- Let’s think of this as tying on before you’d be tying on. Hey you could actually do both!
- You have a ‘dummy’ warp prepared ont your warp beam. This could be part of an old warp left on the beam or a lower value warp beamed, which maybe isn’t even weaveable.
- You tie on the new warp to that dummy, and then beam, so that the new warp is beamed on top of the old warp. This works particularly well on a sectional setup.
- What this means is that you don’t lose the loom waste from what is stuck through and behind the heddles and at the footer.
3. Untie and fringe your header and footer
- Here’s a sneaky one. Don’t worry about ‘wasting’ that header – untie it and use it as your fringe. You’ll tidy it up in wet finishing anyway. Same with the warp that’s trapped through the heddles back to the back stick. Untie it or cut off the knots, and you have a bonus fringe.
I said three but I’m going to sneak one bonus in here!
4. Use thinner fibres
- I know some of you are staring at me thinking, but that takes ages. Yes, yes it does, but if time isn’t a huge cost to you, give finer fibres a try. Something like 16/2ne Supima cotton would be the best place to start. Your finished cloth is a lower GSM and therefore simply uses less material. You’ll also end up with a lovely, fine cloth.
Do any of these work for you? If this was helpful, please feel free to share!