Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Blind intersection — where it appears

An intersection where a colour-and-weave surface shows the same colour whichever way the interlacement goes. Their number is what decides how many drafts a coloured surface fails to distinguish, and it is read off the two colour orders alone.

Named by 2 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Also named here as collision — the same set of essays touches all of them, so they are one junction rather than several.

Three different weaves, one cloth. Drafts drawn from one collision class, with the blind intersections marked, and the single surface all of them produce. Where the two crossing threads are the same colour the weave leaves no trace, so the cloth cannot report what it is.

Colour and weave as a two-colour problem

Where the two threads crossing are the same colour, the intersection looks identical whichever is on top. Half of them are, so 22,874 drafts collapse onto 256 surfaces — eighty-nine weaves apiece, and no way to tell them apart.

pattern · Pattern A tartan sett in 2/2 twill. A pivoted sett of 70 threads used in both systems, which is what makes a tartan a tartan rather than a check. On the left, the cloth at block scale: the squares on the diagonal have one colour in both systems and the rest are mixtures. On the right, one mixture rectangle at thread scale, where the weave decides. In 2/2 twill the reflection survives on 50.0 per cent of a mixture's intersections, against a ceiling of 75 per cent that no weave can reach. The three tints stand for the three colours of the sett and carry no other meaning here.

A check is two stripes and a tartan is one

A tartan is quoted as one sett of thread counts because the warp and the weft carry the same order. That is said to make it symmetric about its diagonal, and the arithmetic says it cannot be — the ceiling is three quarters, and a 2/2 twill reaches one half.

pattern · Stripe

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

CollisionColour and weaveBalanceCensusCheckColour orderFaceHoundstoothPivoted settSurface patternTartanTranspose

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