Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Herringbone — where it appears

A twill reversed at intervals so its diagonal runs alternately each way, in stripes across the cloth. Where the reversal falls decides whether the two directions meet cleanly or leave a line, and the width of the stripe is a shaft cost.

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

A 2/2 twill reversed — the clean way. A twill reversed at intervals, generated from the rule rather than drawn. The count beside it is the number of adjacent ends that come out identical, which is the defect a weaver sees as a thick line at the seam and which no amount of looking at the grid announces.

Broken and herringbone twills

Reversing a twill is the cheapest way to turn a rule into a figure, and there are two ways to do it that look identical on paper. One of them leaves two adjacent ends doing exactly the same thing.

weaves · Foundation weaves 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.

Broken twillCensusCloth integrityColumn setCracked lineDraftFloat lengthHarness costHeddlePoint paperReversalShafts

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