Every piece of cloth in your house was made out of thread by somebody who had to decide, thread by thread, what it was going to look like. Four things to do below. Three of them need a shirt you already own and a ruler. The fourth one needs the label inside it. Each one ends.
Our plaid, drawn from its 108 numbers. Not a photograph. Nobody has woven it yet.
Where the fibre came from: three crayon maps, three real tariff numbers, and the surprise that the two places the same distance away are charged completely differently.
In this order if you like. The first one takes five minutes.
Fetch a shirt and a jumper. Pull them both sideways. One of them fights you and one of them does not, and the reason is the whole of how cloth is made.
Put a ruler on a shirt and count how many threads fit in ten millimetres. Then do a towel, a tea towel and a bedsheet, and find out which thing in your house is the finest.
Our flannel has a hundred and eight threads in it before the pattern starts again. Here is the recipe and a grid. Colour it in, then write your own recipe and see what comes out.
Three of our things start in three different places. Two of them start almost exactly the same distance away, and only one of them gets charged at the door. Go and read the labels in your own house first.
This is the whole recipe. Count out this many threads of each colour, in this order, and then start the list again. Do it going up and down and again going side to side, and where they cross you get a plaid. Weavers call the list a sett, and ours packs about 54 threads into every inch, so one repeat is roughly two inches wide.
The Greenbush Check exists as a recipe and as a picture. It does not exist as cloth. We wrote to four mills at the end of August asking what it would cost to weave and how few we could order, and we are still waiting on every one of them. Until a mill says yes, the shirt is a hundred and eight numbers and nothing else.
Can you help. Nothing yet, and that is the honest answer. Waiting on somebody else is most of this job.
These are the real ones. A weaver uses every word on this list, so you may as well learn it the way they say it the first time.
The Greenbush Check is going onto one heavyweight flannel, woven and never printed, named for the town Dan grew up beside. It has not been made yet and there is no photograph of it, so the listing says so and takes an email instead of an order.
The Greenbush Check Flannel