Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Hanging together — where it appears

The everyday name for what this collection's criterion decides, which is whether a draft is one cloth or several. The failure is invisible on point paper, which is why the test is run on every weave a figure draws.

Named by 3 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Whether the cloth is one cloth. Two drafts. Both interlace everywhere, both have short floats, and both look like perfectly ordinary weaves. One is a single fabric and the other is two fabrics lying on each other, and the bars beside each strand say which layer it belongs to.

Does it hang together

A draft can interlace everywhere, have short floats, and describe two fabrics lying on each other rather than one. Nothing about the drawing says so, and the test that does is exact.

cloth · Integrity 3 cloths on 6 ends. A repeat of 6 ends and 6 picks holding 3 complete cloths, each with 2 ends and 2 picks of its own. The bars beside the strands say which cloth each belongs to; the ceiling at this size is 3, and the longest float is 5 because the face warp passes over every pick below it.

How many layers a draft can have

Of the 22,874 four-by-four drafts this site sweeps, 22,730 are one cloth and 144 are two. None is three, and none can be — a repeat of n ends holds at most n halved cloths, because every cloth needs two ends and two picks of its own before it interlaces at all.

cloth · Integrity How much of a fabric's yarn crosses between the beds. The share of half periods that cross from one bed to the other, read off each structure's own traverse rather than quoted. It is the mechanical difference between these fabrics in this account: a half period that crosses climbs the whole bed gap and one that does not climbs a yarn diameter. Single jersey and a tubular fabric come out at zero — the tubular one because its two faces are made on separate courses and never meet — and a one-by-one rib comes out at one, with every sinker loop crossing. A two-by-two rib is at a half, which is the number a reader would guess and is here counted.

A tube and an interlock balance for different reasons

Two structures come out identically flat on a signed count and are as unalike as two knitted fabrics get. One is two jerseys that curl in opposite directions and are joined at the edges; the other is a fabric whose every course crosses. Telling them apart needs a different question asked of the same grid.

knits · Two-bed

Named alongside it

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

Cloth integrityConnectivityDouble clothLoose endCensusCourseCurlFloatInterlacingInterlockLayer boundNeedle bed

All concepts