At the end of last week I received two emails about whether the 38 count (also known as 20L) linens which are on the market are evenweave or not.<\/p>\n
Let’s start with a definition of evenweave: I will say this next point very emphatically: evenweave has nothing to do with whether some threads are thicker or thinner than others. Slubs in the linen have no bearing on whether the fabric is evenweave. Now that we have also established what evenweave is not, let’s go back to the effect it has practically.<\/p>\n If the quantity of threads over the same distance differ, then the linen is not evenweave. But are there really many “evenweave” linens that are truly evenweave and have exactly the same quantity of threads over the same distance on both dimensions of the fabric? Not often! <\/p>\n If this is the case, what can we consider evenweave, and what would we not consider to be evenweave?<\/p>\n If the thread quantities differ only slightly e.g. over a distance of say 10cm\/4inches, there is a difference of only a 2 or 3 threads, then that’s actually pretty good, and probably as good as you can hope for. <\/p>\n If they differ by about 10 or more over that distance, then that’s not a great result, and I would definitely not consider the linen to be evenweave.<\/p>\n Why is evenweave important? Sometimes evenweave is not important. If you’re working on the surface of the fabric, and not counting threads to determine the placement of stitches, then it does not matter at all. However if you’re working counted embroidery, where the placement of stitches IS determined by the number of threads you’ve counted over, then it can be important.<\/p>\n For counted embroidery, usually the time that it has the most effect is if you’re working square designs. If your square is meant to span 100 threads, and on one dimension of the fabric that 100 threads spans 10cm, and on the other it takes only 8cm to span 100 threads, then your square is not going to be very square!<\/p>\n If your fabric seems to be nearly evenweave (say with a difference of only 1-2 threads over 1 inch), then will it be ok? If you’re only making a small embroidery, which spans only a small distance, such as 7cm or 3 inches, then a difference of 2 or 3 threads over that whole distance is not going to show up much. It will mean that if the design is supposed to be square, it will just turn out slightly rectangular, but probably not noticeably so.<\/p>\n But, if you’re making a large embroidery, such as the tablecloth in my book, then any difference in the thread count is going to show up much more over that very large distance. <\/p>\n When 10cm and a difference of 10 threads is multiplied out over a large distance e.g. 70cm (so that would be 70 extra threads over one dimension), you can see that it makes a very noticeable effect. A square pattern would not turn out square on the fabric!<\/p>\n When 10cm and a difference of 2 threads is multiplied out over a large distance e.g. 70cm (with an extra 14 threads over one dimension), you can see that it is not so noticeable. It IS different, but probably not so different that you can’t live with it.<\/p>\n Tomorrow we will look at the 38 count linens that I am familiar with, and how they rate as evenweave.<\/p>\n If there was any part of today’s post that you didn’t understand, please ask questions. This is actually a really important concept for most counted thread embroidery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the end of last week I received two emails about whether the 38 count (also known as 20L) linens which are on the market are evenweave or not.<\/p>\n Let’s start with a definition of evenweave: Evenweave linen means that over the same direction across both the weft and warp of the fabric there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,23,41,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-embroidery-musings","category-hints-and-tips","category-portuguese-embroidery","category-portuguese-whitework-bullion-embroidery-from-guimaraes","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5186"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5199,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions\/5199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nEvenweave linen means that over the same direction across both the weft and warp of the fabric there are the same number of threads. Therefore if you measured a distance across the weft of the fabric (to remember which one that is, it is from left to right or side to side across the fabric – and left<\/strong> rhymes with weft<\/strong>) of say 10cm or 4 inches, and counted up all the threads, in theory they should match the number of threads over the same distance of the warp (down the length of the fabric).<\/p>\n