Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Figured cloth — where it appears

A cloth carrying one weave inside a region and another outside it, which is what damask, matelassé and every jacquard design that is not a stripe are. Its regions are blocks and its boundaries run in both directions at once, which is why a stripe's soundness proof does not carry over and the question has to be settled by enumeration.

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

A 40-by-40 motif on a poplin, drawn and finished. A motif 40 ends wide and 40 picks tall, at the setts the reed and the take-up were set to, and the same motif measured on the finished cloth. Point paper has one cell per end and per pick, so a motif's proportions are the ratio of the two setts — and both setts move in the finishing, in opposite directions. On the poplin the aspect changes by a factor of 0.8429, so a circle drawn as a circle at the loom's numbers comes back 15.7% out of round and a designer who wants a circle must draw an ellipse of 1.1863. What the drawing cannot show is that the correction is not a property of the design: it belongs to the cloth, so the same card woven on a different construction is a different shape.

A motif is drawn at the wrong shape on purpose

Point paper has one cell per end and per pick, so a design's proportions on the cloth are the ratio of the two setts. Both setts move in the finishing and they move in opposite directions, so a circle drawn as a circle comes back out of round — by three per cent on a balanced cloth and by sixteen on a warp-dense one.

pattern · Pattern What a profile draft can reach at 4 by 4. The share of the 22,874 interlacing 4-by-4 drafts that a profile draft can express, at two block sizes. A profile is a grid of blocks each carrying a figure weave or a ground weave, so its image is every draft reachable by any choice of the two weaves and any assignment — which is enumerated here rather than argued: 4,096 combinations at the larger block, and the distinct results counted. With two-by-two blocks it reaches 306 drafts, which is 1.34 per cent. With one-by-one blocks the profile is the draft and it reaches all of them, which is the control. What the bars cannot show is that the reachable drafts are the useful ones: every figured cloth ever woven is in the small set, and the notation is narrow because designs are.

A profile draft is a notation whose alphabet is weaves

The rung below measured four notations for a single weave and left open the notations for something larger. A profile draft is the first of them: a grid of blocks, each carrying a figure weave or a ground weave. Its image is enumerable and it is tiny — every pair of two-by-two weaves against every assignment of two-by-two blocks reaches 306 of the 22,874 interlacing four-by-four drafts, which is 1.34 per cent. And the 306 are the ones anybody weaves.

cloth · Notation

Named alongside it

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

Point paperRepeatAspect ratioBlockCensusContractionEnumerationJacquardNotationRelaxationSettTake-up

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