Not just any yarn will work for tapestry weaving and if you’ve tried to use a knitting yarn like Cascade 220 or Knit Picks Wool of the Andes,* you know that these squishy yarns are difficult to use for tapestry and don’t get the best results.

A good tapestry yarn isn’t lofty, doesn’t have much end-to-end stretch, and comes in a lot of colors. Most tapestry weavers bundle thinner weft strands in a bundle to not only achieve the weft bundle size they need for the sett they’re working at, but to increase their color options by blending hues in the weft bundle.

Ah yarn, the most fabulous of materials!! I suspect many of us love yarn quite passionately and we’d fight fiercely for our stashes. My tapestry yarn stash is full of a wide variety of yarns, but I have favorites that I come back to repeatedly depending on what I am weaving. The most important consideration in my opinion when choosing a weft yarn for tapestry is what idea you’re communicating and what material will do that the best.

The question that no tapestry techniques book I’ve ever seen (including mine) addresses is how much weft yarn do you need for a tapestry. Frustrating, right? If you don’t have a yarn stash, how do you know how much to buy?

If you owned a yarn store, you might just grab an extra skein if you ran out and not worry about it. But most of us do not own our own endless yarn supply. We want to make sure we won’t run short but we also don’t want piles of a color we may never use again.

Tapestry weaving has a different structure than other weaving and so the amount of yarn you need is a bit different that if you were weaving a scarf on a rigid heddle loom. However, some of the methods of estimating amounts are similar. There are several approaches you could take to figure out how much weft yarn you need. Warp needs are easier to calculate and I’ll address that at the end of the post.