Weird crafting question

[dianec42]

In my capacity as know-it-all, I recently stumbled upon something I don't know, and it's driving me nuts.

I asked on Reddit, but apparently I did a terrible job of phrasing the question, so allow me a brief story time here:

Aida cloth and tapestry needles both come in various sizes/scales. For aida cloth, it's 14/16/18 etc; for needles it's 24/26/28. For both, the higher the number the smaller the thing.

And for aida cloth (or evenweave) the numbers actually mean something - 14-count aida has 14 squares to the inch, for example.

Question: What about needle sizes? Do the numbers mean anything in absolute scale? Like, you could fit 28 size-28 needles in a centimeter or something? Or are they just arbitrary and relative?

Please tell me I'm not the only person who wonders about these things! Lie to me if you must.

P.S. I've also posted this over in the cross stitch community, where someone has already answered... not the question I asked. Did I stutter?

Comments

[rmd]

My initial guess is it's related to wire gage, aka 'awg' measurements, but I have no idea. However, this is the internet so I'll pontificate anyways.

[rmd]

I think I may be correct. I read it on the internet so it must be true

[dianec42]

OMG. Thank you!

I mean, looking at the actual numbers on that page, even the standard numbers... well, maybe they have a meaning but I certainly can't tell what it is. :D

Someone over on the cross stitch community did come up with something useful, namely that the size ranges for embroidery needles and tapestry needles don't overlap. I'm guessing at some point someone said "we need a standard; here, this range isn't taken, let's use even numbers in case we ever decide to produce the sizes in between." So those probably are arbitrary.

[siderea]

I'd always meant to look this up. Drawing wire is an underappreciated technological development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge

Increasing gauge numbers denote decreasing wire diameters [...] This gauge system originated in the number of drawing operations used to produce a given gauge of wire. Very fine wire (for example, 30 gauge) required more passes through the drawing dies than 0 gauge wire did. [...]

By definition, № 36 AWG is 0.005 inches in diameter, and № 0000 is 0.46 inches in diameter. The ratio of these diameters is 1:92, and there are 40 gauge sizes from № 36 to № 0000, or 39 steps. Because each successive gauge number increases cross sectional area by a constant multiple, diameters vary geometrically. Any two successive gauges (e.g., A & B ) have diameters in the ratio (dia. B ÷ dia. A) of ³⁹√92 (approximately 1.12293), while for gauges two steps apart (e.g., A, B, & C), the ratio of the C to A is about 1.122932 = 1.26098.

[...]

Rules of thumb

The sixth power of ³⁹√92 is very close to 2,[5] which leads to the following rules of thumb:

[...]

• When the diameter of a wire is doubled, the AWG will decrease by 6. (E.g. № 2 AWG is about twice the diameter of № 8 AWG.)