I wanted this cape to go with the collar, which meant using the rest of the brown Lincoln wool. For the collar I had pulled out the grays and lighter browns as well as the dark browns to give a feeling of depth. This left the dark brown for the cape, which would coordinate but not be too matchy-matchy (do I sound like I watch Project Runway?)
This fleece was a gift about 15 years ago from a shepherd who was getting out of the business. I had washed it before storage but decided to rewash it to freshen it up a bit. Then I got to play with All. The. Toys. Because of the long-term storage it resisted being pulled apart, so I opened it up with my picker. The staple length was quite long--5" or so--so I combed it with my English 5 pitch combs. This gave a beautiful top--and a *lot* of waste. I didn't have an infinite amount of fleece--and this was irreplaceable--so I ran the waste through my drum carder to straighten it, and then combed that with my St. Blaise 2 pitch combs. What was waste from that was pretty unspinnable so it went to a ditch for erosion control.
I did a few samples on a couple of wheels and then made the intelligent choice to go with my default yarn (which tends to be 24 wraps per inch, two ply). After all--if I had to be spinning literally miles of yarn it might be nice to not have to think about it.
And thus began the Marathon of Spinning. How much? I had no idea. Some people would design the entire project and then, armed with all the necessary knowledge, begin. That's not how I work. I scatter the parts around. I knew that I would need a boatload of yarn (that's an exact amount) so I could be spinning that while I dickered around with patterns and figured out how much a boatload of yarn is.
Pattern. A basic cape is pretty simple--you take a half circle of fabric, cut a neck hole in the middle of the straight side--hem, trim, whatever--and you have a cape. But you need to look a little closer to see what's going on.
The first is the basic cape. But look at those lines I drew there--those are the warp lines. A fabric hangs differently from the warp than it does from the weft (and I was planning on using a different fleece for the weft). Especially a very loosely woven fabric. So the fronts would hang on the warp, the back would be hanging along the weft, and the shoulders would be on the bias. Problems could occur.
You could keep the grainlines consistent by using the second pattern--wedges. But the problem there is that you are sewing a diagonal edge to a diagonal edge. Fabric likes to stretch on the diagonal (aka bias) so there are also potential problems there.
I had my Eureka! moment when I found the last pattern on the deviant art page (not certain why a cape is deviant, but thank you eqos.deviantart.com). Alternating straight panels with wedges keeps the grainline consistent, and each diagonal is sewn to a straight edge, keeping that bias under control. A *huge* added bonus is this:
The cutting pattern (you have to use it twice). The bonus is that is uses *all* of the fabric--no random corners or curves cut off and discarded. Trust me--when you've spent a gazillion hours spinning and weaving, the last thing you want to do is throw any of it away. I modified it a bit to use narrow panels rather than wide ones cut in half lengthwise (which would give me non-raveling selvedge edges on the straight panels). I wanted the panels to be 15 inches wide. There would be some shrinkage, so I wanted to weave at 18 inches wide. To have some sturdy selvedges I doubled the yarn for 6 ends at each selvedge. I was going to weave this in two 9-yard panels (because my loom can't handle a super-long warp) so tapping on the calculator I needed:
120 ends of yarn x 9 yards x 2 panels = 2, 160 yards of yarn (plus extra for making samples.)
Good thing I'd been spinning while figuring all that out.
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