Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Draft — where it appears

A weave written on point paper, one square to each intersection, filled where the warp is on the face. It records the interlacement exactly and nothing else, so thickness, thread and the relative origin of two weaves are all outside it.

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

The 2/2 twill. The 2/2 twill on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it.

The draft is a matrix

Point paper is not a diagram of cloth. It is a grid of yes-or-no decisions about which threads to lift, which makes a weave a binary matrix and almost every question about it arithmetic.

cloth · What cloth is A stripe of a satin stripe on a plain ground. a satin stripe on a plain ground, written as one draft of 8 picks and 20 ends. Each band is generated from its own rule and the whole matrix is measured as one: 10 shafts, which is the number of distinct columns in the union of the two bands, against 8 if every column were shared and 10 if none were. The bands have 0 columns in common.

A stripe is a partition of the warp

A striped cloth is not a weave with decoration on it — it is one matrix in which different bands of ends obey different rules. The shaft count is a set union rather than a sum, and of forty-five pairs of standard weaves only three share a single column.

pattern · Stripe

Named alongside it

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

Point paperCensusCloth integrityColumn setFloatHarness costHeddleHerringboneInterlacingRepeatShaftsStripe

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