10:31 AM 10/9/2023
pink linen-cotton is 29" x 2 = 58"
Note says that it shrinks to 57"
Yellow cotton was 42" x 4 yd and 25" was left over, three and a half feet long on the side where I cut away a front yoke.
Therefore, four yards of the pink should be ample, and leave room to cut a matching do-rag, perhaps also a pink cap for cool-but-not-cold weather.
When I emptied the off-season drawer, I found a quick-and-dirty muslin cap I'd made for a Back to the Days of Kosciusko festival, and it is perfect under my helmet: it covers more territory than a do rag, but doesn't have long tails to wrap around my neck. I'm pretty sure I didn't take notes while making it and I've forgotten where I got the pattern, but I think I can make a pattern by measuring it. I'll start a blog for that.
Complication: I also need three pink bras. These are cut on the bias, so it's difficult to calculate how much cloth to allow.
Out to the freezer with pattern, 45° triangle, and yardstick. A bias line that starts ten inches from the end leaves ample room for a front in the corner.
A bias strip one inch wide takes up about an inch and a half of lenghth. The square root of two times 57 is 80.6. (Sanity chech: yes, that's a bit less than one and a half times 60.)
That's almost two and a quarter yards.
The cut edges of the armholes and neck hole of the front measure 39".
It's only a 60" tape measure, so I'm starting over for the back.
33"
Total two yards even. Approximately.
So one strip should do one bra.
To allow for goofing up and so forth, let's plan on making three extra strips for the bias box. One and a half of six is nine, so the bias line for the bras starts nineteen inches from the end of the fabric.
Naively, one divides eighty inches by the widths of the front and back to see how many are in a row, but there is a triangle at each end.
The back is almost 21.5" and the front is almost 23.5"
Naive division makes it one and three-fourths bras per row.
I would probably make each row all fronts or all backs to facilitate the interlocking of the straps.
After much brain-straining and confusion, I make the wasted triangle thirteen inches for the front and fourteen for the back. For bias-line purposes, the triangle occurrs at only one end -- the triangle at the other end is taken off the next bias line up.
So eighty inches allows 80 minus 13, divide by 23.5 = 2.8 fronts.
80 minus 14, divide by 21.5 = 3 backs.
So one bias strip with backs along the bottom and two fronts along the top, plus the front in the corner, is three bras.
I don't like the backs coming out *exact*, but the width taken was a teensy bit over, and one can nip an eighth of an inch off the corner of a seam allowance, so one strip should suffice.
But how wide is it? Perhaps I should simply assume that the straps *don't* interlock. After all, if it shrinks an inch crosswise, it is going to shrink more than that in the length.
That should suffice, because there is a wasted fifty-seven inch triangle from which parts of the jersey can be cut.
Oops, cutting the corner off with a front in it does not leave bias strips the full width of the fabric.
But I'm so close to the end of the wrong calculation that I might as well finish it.
The front and back each fit into a strip 19" wide. A 38" bias strip would measure about fifty-seven inches along the length of the fabric.
I've got the calculator, lets use the square root of two instead of working it in my head: 53.7"
Round to fifty-four, add nineteen, and then add fifty-seven to find out where the other end of the bias line is: 130", divide by thirty-six: 3.6 yards, add four for the jersey, about eight yards.
Are there eight yards on the roll? I count twenty-five wraps. The roll is thirteen and a half inches around. The core is five and a half.
13.5" + 5.5" = 19"
19" X 25 = 475"
divide by two: 237.5"
divide by 36"/yd: 6.6 yd.
So no calculations needed. Wash the entire roll, cut out the jersey, make bras out of what's left.
But I want the bras sooner than the jersey!
Looking more closely at the note, it says «8' -> 95" x 57"».
So it will shrink one inch in every eight feet.
6.6yd x 95" divide by 96" = 6.5 yards
11:12 AM 10/23/2023
Unrolled it. Inner end appears reasonably square. I must have missed a few turns when counting, as I measure seven yards and twenty-six inches.
11:20 AM 10/26/2023
Washed and machine dried, the width is 57"
Length is seven yards and twenty-four inches.
Not a bunch of shrinkage.
I soaked it overnight, let it finish the wash cycle, cancelled the rinse cycle, and rinsed it by running it through a hot "bulky/sheets" cycle. Which had a cold rinse. (And the "hot" was only warm; the programmers were terrified of undiluted hot water. Heating water above the desired temperature, then cooling it by adding cold somehow "saves energy". ("Desired" is, of course, their "desired", not mine.)
Just got my pink linen-cotton down from the shelf. I plan to cut all of it into bras.
I really, really need a linen cycling jersey, but there is no way I could finish one before next summer. Might take months just to buy the fabric.
I calculated, in ROUGH062.HTM, that a bias strip wide enough to cut fronts and backs without straps interlocking would measure 54" along the selvage. (38" x 2^.5). I also state that the linen measures 7 yards 24".
((36"/yd x 7 yd) + 24")/54"/strip = 5.1 such strips.
But some of the strips would be pieced. The fabric is 57"wide, which means that one end of the first strip would be 57" from the cut edge.
276" - 57" leaves 219": 4.1 whole strips
I suspect that my calculation that one could get three bras from each such strip is wrong, but that's still too many bras.
Each bias line would be eighty inches. Fronts are 23.5" wide. (Twenty-three and a quarter by the yardstick.) Three fronts would be 70.5". Would the extra ten inches be enough for the slanted end to clear the body?
Nope. The corner is almost twelve inches high, and it's a forty-five degree slant, so one would need twelve extra inches.
Backs are two inches narrower, and only ten inches high; perhaps I could alternate two fronts and a back with two backs and a front.