Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Conservation — where it appears

A quantity that a rearrangement cannot change — the width a reed sets, the yarn in a section, the total correlation of a draft with itself. Each one is asserted rather than assumed, because a rearrangement that quietly changed one would be a bug that produced entirely plausible figures.

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

Pull it lengthways and it narrows. The same cloth before and after a small extension along the warp. No thread has stretched: the extension came out of the warp crimp, that crimp went into the weft, and the fabric is narrower for it.

Crimp, and why cloth narrows when it is pulled

A thread in cloth is longer than the cloth it crosses. Pull the fabric one way and that extra length is taken out of one direction and put into the other, so the cloth gets narrower without a single fibre stretching.

setting · Crimp How much a draft agrees with itself. On the left the draft; on the right its correlation at every offset, one cell per offset, with the offset of nothing at the top left. Warp-up counts as plus one and weft-up as minus one, so the number in each cell is agreements minus disagreements out of 64. The correlations away from the origin sum to exactly -64, whatever the draft — structure can be moved about and not removed.

A crepe cannot be structureless

A crepe weave is designed to have no line in it anywhere. The correlations of a draft with itself sum to a number fixed by the repeat alone, so structure can be spread and never removed — and on eight ends the floor turns out to be half the repeat, set by a fact about binary words with nothing textile in it.

weaves · Texture weaves

Named alongside it

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

AutocorrelationCensusCrepeCrimpCrimp interchangeExtensionFloat lengthPeirceRegular satinRepeatSatinScatter

All concepts