A short warp is unfixable. Wind the right one.
Finished size through take-up and shrinkage to width at the reed, ends from your sett, warp yards with your loom's own waste, and the weft to match — every count rounded up, because there is no fixing a short warp. Everything stays in your browser.
The project
Your conventions
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the cones are inventory by the yard: the warp consumes its real yardage at its real cost, and every towel in the run knows what the cotton in it cost. See for fiber artists or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
The worksheet every project starts with
Every weaving project begins with this worksheet, because the one unfixable mistake in the craft is a warp wound short. The math below is the same math the calculator runs, conventions named.
Why is the woven size bigger than the finished size?
Two shrinks in sequence. Take-up is the crimp the yarn takes as it interlaces — the cloth on the loom under tension is wider and longer than it will be relaxed. Then the first wash fulls it further. Ten percent each is the worksheet convention; your own record of what a finished towel really measured against what you wove is the number that beats it, which is why both are settings.
What is loom waste and why does it matter so much?
The warp you cannot weave: the tie-on at the front, the thrums the back beam keeps, the sampling inches. Twenty-four to thirty-six inches is the argued range and it belongs to YOUR loom and YOUR tie-on habit — measure it once off a finished warp and use your number forever. On a 500-end warp, a foot of waste either way is 165 yards of yarn.
How much yarn does a towel run actually take?
More than intuition says: eight 20×28 towels at 20 EPI works out to roughly 4,200 warp yards plus 3,800 weft — over 8,000 yards of cotton for a stack of towels. That is why weavers buy cones, and why running this worksheet before winding is universal practice — the calculator just refuses to do it on the back of an envelope.
Sett is missing from your conventions — why?
Because sett is a design decision, not a convention. The right EPI follows the yarn, the weave structure, and the hand you want — a plain-weave towel and a twill runner from the same cotton sett differently. Wraps-per-inch and a sample are how weavers find it; this page takes the sett you chose and does the arithmetic that follows.