Cloth that feels expensive usually just has more threads squeezed into the same space. You can prove that with a ruler, in your own house, this afternoon.
Not knitted ones. If you are not sure which is which, pull it sideways first: the woven ones fight back. A shirt, a tea towel and a bedsheet is a good three, because they are usually as far apart as a house gets.
Flat, not held above it, and pull the cloth smooth first. A wrinkle under the ruler adds threads that are not there.
Find the 0 mark and the 10 mark. Everything happens between those two lines.
Pick the threads running up and down. Count how many you can see between 0 and 10. Do not count the ones going across yet.
If they are too small to see, hold a phone camera over it and zoom all the way in. That is not cheating. That is what a magnifier is, and a real inspector has one on a stand.
Somewhere else on the same cloth. Write both numbers down. They will not match exactly, and that gap is the most interesting thing you will find today.
Counting the same thing twice and getting two answers is not you being bad at counting. It happens to everybody, which is why anybody serious measures more than once and writes down all of it.
Turn the ruler ninety degrees and count the threads going across. Often it is a different number from the first one. That is normal and it has names: the ones going up and down are the warp, the ones going across are the weft, and a mill quotes both.
Fewest threads first, most threads last. That order is almost always the same order as roughest to smoothest, and usually the same order as cheapest to dearest. You have just measured quality with a ruler.
The flannel we are having woven is specified at 54 threads per inch. The trade counts per inch, not per ten millimetres, because weaving is old and inches are older. To get from your number to theirs, multiply by two and a half.
One inch is 25.4 millimetres exactly, so 54 per inch works out at 21.3 in ten millimetres. We wrote 21 because you cannot count a third of a thread. The rounding is ours and now you know about it.
Copy this onto a bit of paper before you start. Two counts each way, and the gap between them written out, because the gap is a real measurement and not a mistake.
| What it is | Up and down | Again | Across | Again | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A shirt | |||||
| A tea towel | |||||
| A bedsheet |
There is a printable version of this idea on the wood bench. The measuring sheet is the same job done to a wooden thing: guess it, measure it, write down the difference, and decide beforehand how far off is still allowed.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is ends per inch.
Ends per inch, written EPI, is how many threads a weaver packs into one inch of cloth. It is the number that decides whether something feels like a bedsheet or like a sack, it is one of the first things a mill is asked to quote, and you just measured it with a school ruler.