A journey of 82,000 shuttle-throws starts with…

…a single spreadsheet.

I’ve decided that I like the Celtic-braid dress fabric enough that I want to weave it up.  So I whipped out my home-cooked spreadsheet today and made my warp and weft calculations.  19 yards of 24″ fabric at 96 epi/ppi, assuming 20% shrinkage lengthwise and 10% widthwise, will require 3.8 pounds of warp, 3.6 pounds of weft, in 2/60 Nm silk at 15,000 yards per pound.  That’s over 110,000 yards of yarn, and over 82,000 throws of the shuttle!!  (And that’s just for the dress!  I’d still need to weave another 20 yards for the coat…)

Good thing the wedding isn’t scheduled yet…

Anyway, I’m debating whether to get started right away or whether to weave another sample first.  I have some samples of metallic gold yarn that should really be woven up with the 2/26 nm silk/cashmere to see how they suit.  Obviously I won’t be able to do that if I start weaving 19 yards of 60/2 silk now, but I’m so excited about this pattern that I can’t WAIT to thread it up!  I’m tired of weaving samples, I want to start weaving the actual dress.  (Of course, we’ll see how I feel about this 9 yards in…this weaves up at about 1/4 the rate of the coat fabric, so this is gonna take a LONG time.)

Well, I’d better start with the canonical single step…which will be putting all the heddles back on my loom, then counting them to see whether I have enough.  24″ wide x 96 epi = 2300 or so heddles.  I thought I had WAY over-bought heddles last year, when I bought the loom and decided to bring it up to 100 heddles per shaft…apparently not!  I hope I have enough.