Needlepoint Thread

What is Loft?

Choosing a needlepoint thread is hard. Do you want matte or shiny? cotton or wool? But all too often you may be disappointed with your choice because the coverage seems thin.

While there are many reasons for poor coverage, one aspect of all needlepoint fibers is their loft, or the amount of air spun into a thread as it is made.

As needlepointers, we don't think about loft much as it is less important to our art than many other characteristics of threads.But knitters think about loft, because the more air spun into a yarn, the warmer it will be (the trapped air stays warmer than the surrounding air).

Threads which have lots of loft have a wonderful characteristic in needlework, they expand along the length of the stitches. You can see this for yourself very easily. Make a line of stitches four threads or so long using a wool or silk/wool blend. Now make another row of stitches the same length using pearl cotton.

The wool stitches fill up the space and sort of become indistinct from each other. They also sit above the canvas a bit. The pearl cotton stitches remain distinct and you might even see white space between them. The wool has more loft than the cotton and so puffs out a bit where it isn’t compressed by the canvas to fill the space better.

While amount of loft is tied fairly closely to the type of fiber, it is not necessarily so. Wool is the most lofty fiber. Cotton tends to be unlofty, but some kinds of cotton, like old DMC matte cotton have some loft. I've seen silks, rayons, and even some metallics with lots of loft, although sometimes you have to work hard to find these kinds of needlepoint thread.