Sett Decisions

TRANSCRIPT Sett Decisions

Before we begin weaving cloth, there is a bit of crucial information that we need that determines the feel and the function of the fabric, and that is sett.

Sett is to weaving what gauge is to knitting. In knitting, you can take a yarn, say like a fingering weight yarn, and you can knit it on tiny, skinny needles to produce tiny, little stitches that will produce a very tight, firm fabric. That might be suitable for something like socks, like I knit my socks on 2.25 millimeter needles and I make a fabric that’s so firm and stiff that it can stand up like cardboard. You want that because that kind of fabric that is firm and stuff affords a certain kind of durability that you want for your socks. You may not want that kind of durability for any other garment that you’re gonna be wearing. So you can take that same fingering weight yarn and then knit it on much larger size needles and produce a larger stitch which then produces a loose, draped, soft fabric that is perfect for a shawl.

It’s the same idea with weaving. Sett is kind of like gauge. Think about the range of fabrics that you could create with a loom. Think about a very firm, stiff, durable, tightly woven fabric. What would that be good for? That might be good for something like upholstery fabric something that needs a lot of durability. And think about something like the cloth that you wear in your shirt. This one happens to be not plain weave, this one happens to be a kind of point twill, but this makes a looser, drapier, softer kind of fabric. And then think about the kind of fabric that you might make for curtains or very gauzy, sheer, something that you could almost see though. That is created by altering the sett of your weaving. And sett is basically describes how closely your warp threads are placed together. You can place your warp threads very, very, very tightly close together and that forms a very firm kind of fabric or has the potential to form a very firm fabric or you can sett very, very wide and have your yarns, your warp threads, spread out very, very far, so that can have the potential of producing a more gauzy fabric.

There’s a lot of other things at play in here because sett is just one part of the equation. Sett describes what your warp threads are doing. It doesn’t actually describe what your weft threads are doing. So later, thinking about if you want to pack your weft threads really, really tight, that can also produce a very firm fabric. Or, if you keep your weft threads very, very loose, that could produce a very gauzy fabric.

So there’s two kinds gauge at play in here. Sett is basically determined by your reed. This happens to be a reed that comes with the Baby Wolf, it’s like the Jack loom over there, but basically, this reed works on multi-shaft looms. This is basically a tool that has all these little slots and they’re just sort of defined by the placement of these metal slats. And so, what you have here is predefined spacing for your wrap threads. This one happens to be a 10-dent reed and so that means that there are 10 slots per one inch section. This device helps determine the density of your cloth. I’m gonna showy you just a few examples of some fabrics that I’ve woven, just a very test, different little weft tests that I’ve done at the end or the beginning of various weaving projects. These are all done with using our Tough Love Sock as the warp yarn. Tough Love Sock is our fingering weight sock yarn. It’s 80% superwash marino wool and it’s 20% nylon, it’s very standard sock yarn.

ESSENTIAL WEAVING // FELICIA LO // SCHOOL OF SWEETGEORGIA 1 COPYRIGHT © 2019 FELICIA LO, SWEETGEORGIA YARNS INC. THESE NOTES ARE COMPILED BY FELICIA LO. PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE. So I put those into the warp and then have woven a whole bunch of different samples with them. In a lot of cases, what I’ve done is, this is maybe the best first example. These two green sections here, these are basically woven with 10 ends per inch for the sock yarn and then it’s woven as a balanced weave. I’ve used the exact same yarn as the weft and I’ve woven it basically 10 picks per inch. It produces a nice, solid, firm fabric. This is great. Down here, I switched to a totally different yarn, a much thinner, much finer yarn. And this one is a 20 over 2 silk, it’s a Bombyx silk, so a cultivated silk, 100% silk yarn. And I’ve used that and because that yarn is so much finer, it doesn’t take up as much space as it’s interlacing through all of the warp yarns and so the fabric down here is significantly more drapey, more gauzy, and it’s not as solid as the fabric up here. It doesn’t feel as good or as solid. In fact, I can actually stick my finger through the fabric and it’s not a functionally very secure fabric. That at 10 ends per inch with this particular yarn is not really a good match. However, I did another sample and this one is, again, also Tough Love Sock yarn and this is a sock yarn, the same fingering weight sock yarn in the warp.

In this case, rather than setting it at 10 ends per inch, I set it at 12 ends per inch, so I made it just slightly more dense, slightly closer together. And again, in this case, I used a couple of different yarns, as a test. One of them was our merino silk lace yarn, which is a 50/50 silk and merino, non-superwash merino, yarn. That up here, at the top, combined with the 12 ends per inch for the sock yarn and the much finer weft yarn, this produces a really beautiful, closely woven, but still soft and still drapey, it’s quite a lovely fabric up here. And then, at the bottom here, like in the previous example here, I’m also using that same 20 over 2 Bombyx silk lace weight yarn here in this sample. In this case, I cannot stick my finger through the fabric. It’s functionally a better cloth. It’s tighter, slightly tighter, slightly more dense, but the combination of this weft yarn and this warp yarn together at this particular sett, this particular combination is great.

So you can see that with one particular yarn, like a sock yarn, it might work really well at 10 ends per inch if you’re going to use a particular weft yarn, but at another density, let’s say 12 ends per inch, it works better with a different weft yarn. There’s so many things that you can do to create very, very different fabrics. Obviously this one, where the sock yarn is crossed with another sock yarn, this produces quite a firm, solid feeling fabric. In this case, this, crossed with the lace weight in the weft, produces a much softer, much drapier kind of fabric. They feel different. It might hard to see on screen because they look like just pictures, but if you weave these kinds of samples and you test and you feel, you can decide for yourself what feels good, what do you want this cloth to be, what would you want this cloth to be. I could absolutely see this as a scarf. This could be my future combination for all the scarves I decide to weave as Christmas presents or whatever it is.

This is where a lot of record keeping comes in handy. Keep track and keep notes of what you wove, what they sett was, how many picks per inch did you weave, what was the weft yarn, what was the warp yarn, remembering all of that information can help as you start on the path towards the next project and the planing towards the next project. If you’re working with a yarn for the first time and you don’t know what sett to start with, how do you know if it should be 10 ends per inch or 12 ends per inch or 15 or 24, how do you even know?

One of the very first things that I would do is I would first figure out what the yards per pound is for your particular yarn. There are different charts, different sett charts that are available that are already preset and they are split up into different fibre blends. There are sett charts specifically for cotton. There are sett charts specifically for linen. There are some sett charts that are specifically for wool, or for silk, for all of the different fibre blends because they all behave differently. Now, if you have figured out that your sock yarn is x number of yards per pound and you know that your sock yarn is also mostly wool, then you can go to the wool sett chart and you can look for the yarn

ESSENTIAL WEAVING // FELICIA LO // SCHOOL OF SWEETGEORGIA 2 COPYRIGHT © 2019 FELICIA LO, SWEETGEORGIA YARNS INC. THESE NOTES ARE COMPILED BY FELICIA LO. PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE. that most closely matches the yards per pound of the yarn that you’re working with. And then follow through and look at the rest of the sett chart to see what is recommended for this particular weight of yarn, this particular grist of yarn.

Now there are many, many different sett charts available and we’ll have links to those below and in the resource part of this course. Now, generally, how sett charts are presented is that there is one sett is kind of like the balanced, middle, easy-going, this is like nice cloth. That’s a nice, balanced sett. Say for sock yarn, maybe it’s 10 ends per inch. And then there’ll be another one that is listed as like firm or tight or maximum or something like that so they’ll have one sett that is specified for making fabric that’s a little bit tighter, a little bit firmer. And then there will be another column that specifies a set that is looser, that might produce a fabric that is more gauzy or more loose. So that is generally how sett charts are presented. Sort of like a high, middle, low sort of arrangement.

You might also look in a book by Peggy Osterkamp. She’s a fabulous weaver and she’s written several books and one of her books has a wonderful repository of sett charts, very, very detailed. She breaks her sett chart down into so many columns. The maximum column for the maximum number of warp threads that you can stick together and then she has a column for 90% of max, which could be use for upholstery and then 80% of max, which might be used for production cloth, then 70% of max, which might be used for clothing and so she goes all the way to about the 50% of the maximum to produce a lacier, gauzier, looser fabric. So she gives a much more wide range of things. It might help you hone in more specifically on the sett that you want to pick for your particular project.

You can definitely use a sett chart as a starting point to figure out what sett to use for your project. You can also do another technique, which is to basically wind wraps per inch and find out what the wraps per inch of your yarn is. You can take a ruler, take a one inch measure, or take a spinning gauge that has a one inch measure and take your yarn and wrap it very carefully into a one inch space. You wanna wrap it where the yarn’s not squished up and overlapping each other, it’s just placed perfectly side by side by side, giving enough, not room for there to be extra wraps, but just perfectly aligned and figure how many wraps per inch there are. And then if you’re wanting to make a balanced fabric, like a balanced, plain weave fabric, as a starting point, you’d basically take that number, that wraps per inch number, and you divide it in half because you need to take out a little bit of that space in order for your weft yarn to go through.

For an example, I found this new yarn that I’m considering using for a project and I wind the wraps per inch and I discover that there’s actually 22 wraps per one inch space, so I would divide that in half, and I would basically look at about 11 ends per inch as my sett. So I know that I reeds in 10 ends per inch and 12 ends per inch, so how would I get 11 ends per inch? I could just work with what I have and weave some samples at 10 ends per inch and some at 12 and compare and see which fabric I like better or I could sort of reference a reed substitution chart and figure out if there’s a way I can sley my reed so it’s not exactly one end per slot. Maybe, in one case, it might be one per slot, one per slot, one per slot, two per slot, one per slot, one per slot, one per slot, two per slot, and so you can adjust how you

ESSENTIAL WEAVING // FELICIA LO // SCHOOL OF SWEETGEORGIA 3 COPYRIGHT © 2019 FELICIA LO, SWEETGEORGIA YARNS INC. THESE NOTES ARE COMPILED BY FELICIA LO. PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE. sley your reed in order to get different densities that don’t necessarily match up exactly with the ends per inch of the reed that you are working with.

There are definitely possibilities there to work in between numbers. Figuring out what kind of a sett to work with is very similar to spinning your own hand-spun yarn and then trying to figure out what needle size do I use to knit that. A lot of it is really trial and error, looking to see what’s been done before, looking to see how your yarn compares with yarns that already exist in the marketplace, that already have more defined numbers.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, you’re gonna wanna sample and test and see what fabric works best for you, which combination works best for you, what do you like the best. And that’s part of the reason why I have all of these random samples. It’s because I’m just testing to see well, do I like this fabric, what do I like better? Could I use this yarn instead? Could I use this sett instead?

All of these things become starting points for making those decisions moving forward. Because it’s necessarily about matching exactly what you found on a sett chart, it’s about getting the fabric that you want.