51I want to weave

Loom, sett, warp plan, draft and finishing - a beta you turn on yourself

Before you start
Beta, honestly: the tools are being shaped together with weavers, so fields, suggestions and calculations will still change. What you record is kept. What the app works out for you - a sett, a shrinkage, a yarn estimate - is a starting point for a sample, never a substitute for measuring your own cloth.
1
Turn On the Weaving Tools

Create a project and set its craft to Weaving - in the new-project sheet, or later from Edit. A Weaving tab appears on the project. Open it and it asks: Try the weaving tools? Tap Turn on weaving tools and the record opens up.

Tip: You can turn them off again at any time in Settings → Appearance, and nothing you have recorded is thrown away.
2
Choose Your Loom
The Weaving tab showing the Loom section with a rigid heddle chosen, and the Sett section beside it

Start with the loom, because it decides what the rest of the tab asks you. Rigid heddle, Table loom, Floor loom, Dobby, Pin loom, Inkle, Tablet or card, Tapestry, Backstrap, or Other. Pick one and the fields that matter for it appear; the ones that do not, do not.

A shaft loom asks for shafts and treadles, and for its loom action - jack, counterbalance or countermarch - because that decides which tie-ups it will weave comfortably. A rigid heddle asks for the heddle size, how many heddles are in the loom, the threading, and any pick-up sticks or heddle rods. A pin loom asks only for the square size and whether you wind one strand per pin or two - and then tells you roughly how much yarn your squares will take.

Tip: Two same-size heddles are not automatically twice the sett. Only two heddles offset by half a dent weave finer cloth, which is why the app asks for the threading as well as the count.
3
Work Out Your Sett

Sett is how closely the warp sits: ends per inch. Record the reed you are using in dents per inch, how many ends per dent you are sleying (one number, or a repeat you count out at the reed such as 2,1), and the width in reed. On a rigid heddle the sett follows from the heddle and threading instead, and the app says where its number came from.

Measure the yarn's wraps per inch - wrap it round a ruler for one inch and count - and the app offers a typical starting sett for that yarn, or a sourced range if you are weaving weft-faced. It says which it is basing that on, and it says to sample.

Worth knowing
Sett / EPI
Ends per inch: how many warp threads sit in an inch of width. Too open and the cloth is sleazy; too close and it is board-stiff.
Warp and weft
Warp runs the length of the loom, under tension. Weft is what you throw across it.
Reed and dent
The comb that spaces the warp. A dent is one gap. A reed marked 50/10 has 50 dents per 10 cm - which is 12.7 per inch, not 50.
Wraps per inch
A quick measure of how thick a yarn is, taken by wrapping it round a ruler.
Tabby
Plain over-one-under-one weave. In overshot the tabby weft is structural: without it the floats are not tied down, and the cloth is not overshot.
4
Record the Structure and Draft

Name the structure you are weaving and where the draft came from - book and page, an archive number, or a link. The structure list shows what our sources document for the loom you chose. It is a citation list, not a rulebook: Other takes any name you like, and rigid-heddle terminology in particular is still settling.

You can hold the draft itself here too. Import WIF brings in a draft from your design program; Export WIF takes it back out to work on there. The draft is drawn the way weavers read it - threading across the top, tie-up top right, treadling down the right, cloth in the middle - and Open full view gives it the whole screen, with a size control for old eyes and small phones.

Tip: The cloth preview renders what your draft would weave. If you like it, Use as project photo adds it to the project's photos on Ravelry - so the project has a picture before it comes off the loom. You can remove it again from the Photos tab.
5
Plan the Warp
The warp plan with take-up, shrinkage, loom waste, draw-in and the finished measurements the warp is planned back from

How long a warp, and how many ends? Record total ends and warp length, then the three things that make a warp longer than the cloth: take-up (the yarn that goes into the over-and-under), shrinkage (what wet finishing will take), and loom waste (what is tied on and never woven). Say how many pieces you are getting from the warp - four towels from one warp is four pieces - and note your warping method. There is also draw-in: how much the width pulls in as you weave, around 10% for a balanced weave and more for a firm beat. Give it the finished width and length you want and the warp is planned back from there.

Worth knowing
Take-up
Cloth is shorter and narrower than the warp you measured, because the threads bend around each other. Planned for, not avoided.
Loom waste
The warp that never becomes cloth: what is tied to the front and back. Roughly the same on every warp for a given loom, so it is worth learning yours.
Wet finishing
Washing the cloth off the loom. Threads bloom and settle - this is when weaving becomes fabric, and it is why the finished measurements differ from the off-loom ones.
6
Say Which Yarn Goes Where
The Yarn section with warp and weft yarn and the yarn count systems, beside Warping method and Finishing with its wet-finishing choices

Pick the yarns on the project's Yarns tab as usual, and they appear here to assign: warp yarn, weft yarn, and tabby weft where the structure needs one. There is a yarn count system field for the counts weavers use rather than knitting weights - cotton count, worsted count, linen lea, Nm, Tex, denier, yards per pound - and a metres per kilogram field for the yarn's grist, which is what turns a length into how much to buy. Leave the weft grist empty and the warp's is used for both.

7
Record What Actually Happened

When the cloth is off the loom, record the off-loom width and length, how you wet finished it - not yet, hand washed, machine washed, fulled, pressed or steamed - and then the finished measurements. The app works out your width and length shrinkage from those two pairs of numbers, and shows you the arithmetic it used rather than asking you to trust it: (off-loom − finished) ÷ off-loom × 100.

Tip: This is the number worth having. Your shrinkage in your yarn on your loom, written down, is what makes the next warp the right length - and no published figure can tell you it.
8
Take It to the Loom, and Share It
Publish to the Ravelry notes with its Notes and Private notes choice, Print project sheet, and the beta footer

Print project sheet turns the whole record into a PDF to keep beside the loom or file with the cloth. On a phone it opens so you can share or print it; on the web it downloads - on an iPhone, look in Files → Downloads.

Publish to the Ravelry project notes writes the record into your notes as one clearly marked section, and keeps it up to date as you change things. Everything else you have written stays untouched - and if you edit inside that section yourself, the app leaves it exactly as you wrote it rather than overwriting your words. You choose whether it goes to your public Notes or your Private notes, and it is a separate opt-in from the tools themselves.

Yarn and quantities live on the project's Yarns tab - see Start a New Project. For everything else about a project, see Work on Your Project.

Available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and web at app.stash2go.com