The journey begins

Yesterday, the yarn arrived, so things are about to get a lot less theoretical. I suppose I should mention what I ordered, hm?

After some reading, I ended up going with a mini-cone each natural and a grey in both Jaggerspun 2/20 and Halcyon's worsted warp.  Now that they've arrived I'm happy to say that I'm pleased with the results.  The 2/20 is a more woolen style yarn, and it's a reasonable weight for period fabrics, if (as I understand other people's summaries of their research, since I haven't gotten to this level of detail yet) a little bit on the coarser side.  So that's good practice for working with that weight of yarn before we get to handspun singles, which will be a whole other level of adventure.  And the worsted, while heavier, makes me happy that I can experiment with worsted yarns, again, before we move on to the precious handspun.  Plus,  heavier yarn is also more forgiving.

After doing some math, I think I'm going to end up with a 4 yard warp of the 2/20.   I didn't do the worsted calculations until after I'd ordered the mini-cones, so I was a little startled by how much heavier this warp is than the Jaggerspun and how much difference that makes in the calculations but at 10 ends per inch (EPI), but I can still get 12 5 inch square blocks to work with. 

For the record, while I can do the math by hand, I really like the Weavolution Weaving Calculator for being able to fiddle with the numbers. 

Other useful tools I've found after much time in the wilderness are reed substitution charts, because it turns out that 1) there are better methods than eyeballing to figure out sett (density of the warp in the reed) and the fact that I only have 15 dent per inch (DPI) reeds, does not actually limit me only to multiples of 15 for the sett.  I mention this mostly because I only figured it out after an embarassingly long time of not really getting what all those numbers in the yarn descriptions meant.

So tonight, I think I start winding warp chains and working on the pre-treatment.  I'm currently pondering adding oil, because in period they used a lot of oil per pound of fiber, and sizing.  I'm leaning toward sizing with gelatin, because while using starch as sizing is period, reports are that it's also very dusty, and my house does not need more dust, so I'm willing to compromise on that specific detail, especially during test runs of the test run.

More to come...