Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Houndstooth — where it appears

A colour-and-weave pattern on a twill in which a broken check emerges from an interlacement that contains no such shape. It is the standard demonstration that a coloured surface is not a picture of the cloth beneath it.

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

Colour and weave — 2/2 twill. One interlacement, threaded in two colour orders. What a reader sees is the colour of whichever thread is on the face, so the visible pattern can be something the draft gives no hint of.

Colour and weave

Thread the same weave with a different order of coloured ends and a pattern appears that is nowhere in the draft. Houndstooth is an ordinary two-and-two twill, and nothing about its interlacement is unusual at all.

pattern · Pattern Three different weaves, one cloth. Drafts drawn from one collision class, with the blind intersections marked, and the single surface all of them produce. Where the two crossing threads are the same colour the weave leaves no trace, so the cloth cannot report what it is.

Colour and weave as a two-colour problem

Where the two threads crossing are the same colour, the intersection looks identical whichever is on top. Half of them are, so 22,874 drafts collapse onto 256 surfaces — eighty-nine weaves apiece, and no way to tell them apart.

pattern · Pattern

Named alongside it

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

Colour-and-weaveBlind intersectionCollisionColour orderFaceSurface patternThreading

All concepts