19/04/2012

Wooden reeds, again

As you may remember, I have been collecting data about old (Swedish) wooden reeds. This has finally resulted in a couple of articles, that now have meanderad onto my website.


Here is the English version, here is the Swedish (which is slightly longer than the one that appeared in Solvögat).

Is there a reader (from anywhere) who has any information about other old systems of measuring reeds/yarn/weaving widths? The more I read, the more fascinated I get... :-)

3 comments:

Andrew Kieran said...

Hey kerstin, I've not got round to reading that article yet but thought is mention that in my college we still have scotch reeds that have one dent in every 7 8ths of an inch.

To figure which reed we need we do this sum

(1.874 x epi) / ends per dent = reed number

Scotch reeds have "gala" next to the number, ie "28 Gala" after Galashiels

Kerstin på Spinnhuset said...

Thanks, Andrew, for the (dare I write odd?) information.
I looked again in Murphy (link in the articla), but can't find anything about Gala reeds (he only talks about Scotch reeds being based on "the Scotch ell of 37 inches").
It can be that my metirc thinking misses something, but I can't see where/how the 1.874 comes from... please?

your confused Swede,
Kerstin

Andrew Kieran said...

oh, hey kerstin

I had to figure that out by the way

i could have sworn i'd posted it. maybe i posted it on my site, i'll have to look.

anyway, the 1.875 (not 1.874, my mistake) comes from 1 and 7/8ths of an inch. by which i mean that in a number 1 reed there is 1 dent in every 1.875 inches. So in a 20 reed, there is 20 dents in every 1.875 inches.

so to work out your reed number, you multiply the ends per inch by 1.875 to get the reed number if you were threading 1 end per dent, and then divide that number by the end per dent and you have your reed number.

I'm not brilliant at maths, I thought about that with a pencil and paper for half an hour :)