38 count linen – evenweave or not? Part 4

To pre-wash or not to pre-wash, that is the question.

Thanks to you, my lovely readers, over the last few days I have had some quite challenging questions. The main ones run along the lines of “do you pre-wash your linen before you count?” and “why don’t you pre-wash your linen before you count?”

Excellent questions.

With all the counting of linen that I did the other day, none of the linens were pre-washed. I have never pre-washed my linen before beginning a project.

Why not? I don’t know!

I pre-wash my polycotton Mountmellick fabric before using it. I pre-wash all my cotton patchwork fabrics before using them. I pre-wash all my dressmaking fabric before using it. I do this because it pre-shrinks the fabric, and removes any size from the fabric.

So why don’t I pre-wash my linen? I don’t know!

I suppose I’m being terribly inconsistent here! I guess it stems from the fact that I’ve always been taught to pre-wash dressmaking fabric, right back from when I did textiles at school, and probably from watching my mum making clothing when we were younger. But school never taught me to pre-wash linen, and my mum didn’t do embroidery, so she didn’t teach me. I’ve never read it in a book, either, come to think of it.

Does it make much difference, whether you pre-wash or not? Yes and no. It does in dressmaking, so why should it be any different for embroidery? When you pre-wash, the fabric shrinks a little. When on the loom for weaving, the threads get that little bit stretched, possibly to different extents depending on whether they are warp or weft threads. When the fabric is washed, those threads are able to relax back to their original state, thereby shrinking a little.

Marilyn, a reader who is both an embroiderer and a weaver, commented the other day that different fibres shrink different amounts. Linen is likely to shrink the least, cotton and silk a little more, and even more so with wool (on the whole). So while linen is the least likely to shrink, it is likely that it will shrink a bit. Jeanine, another reader, quoted Stefania Bressan who is an Italian embroidery designer and teacher, saying “Sotema 20L shrinkage is 7% for the warp and 4% for the weft.”

Shrinkage could therefore cause some problems if you’ve stitched on un-shrunk fabric, and then washed it later. If the amount of shrinkage was the same for both the warp and the weft, it would probably matter less, but as it can be different across both dimensions, it could make things go out of shape and pucker strangely. This is why we always pre-wash dressmaking fabric – we don’t want our clothes to fit us badly! Therefore it would make sense to pre-wash all linen fabric, as it is likely that we put MANY MANY more hours of time and effort into a hand embroidered piece than a machine sewn piece of clothing.

The more I write this, the more I am convinced that I have been terribly inconsistent in my pre-washing!

But on the other hand, with the amount of hand stitching I’ve done over the years, you would think that it might have been a problem before now. Surely, something would have ended up weird and puckered. However, nothing has…

If you’re never going to wash the fabric after you’ve stitched on it then it probably doesn’t matter, as long as you keep it extremely clean while you’re stitching on it. An example of this is if the piece is going to be framed. Unlike a piece of clothing, it will never require regular laundering.

Mary Corbet has written about pre-shrinking linen, and even gives instructions for how to do it well. On this page, if you scroll down a fair way (though all of it is interesting reading) you’ll find her tips on fabric preparation and shrinking.

Going back to our topic over the past few days, of whether 38 count linen is evenweave or not, pre-washing could definitely make a difference to whether a fabric is evenweave or not. Because the shrinkage of the warp and weft can be different, it could either make the fabric become closer to evenweave, or get worse.

So, over to you! Are you as inconsistent as I am with your pre-washing? Do you pre-wash linen? Or cotton? Or silk (most people I know don’t actually wash silk at all)? Or wool? Do you pre-wash some and not others? Why or why not? At the risk of opening up another can of worms, do you pre-wash your threads before stitching with them?