Lustre — where it appears
Named by 26 essays across 6 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
The float decides
How far a thread runs on the face before it goes under is one number, and it sits behind lustre, drape, snagging, abrasion, tear strength and how densely the cloth can be set. Almost nothing else in the subject has that reach.
A damask is its own complement
The pattern is carried by direction alone. Figure and ground are the same satin, one warp-face and one weft-face, with the same longest float, the same shaft count and the same threading — so the cloth's most famous effect costs it no structural difference whatever between the two areas.
Why satin shines
Lustre is usually filed under fibre, and silk gets the credit. It is a property of the weave: a cylinder reflects a line rather than a point, so the highlight a cloth returns is exactly as long as its longest float.
Calendering is the cloth arriving at the other model
This site has carried two thread sections side by side since its foundation — Peirce's circle and Kemp's racetrack — and has been careful to say which produced any number. They are not two opinions about one yarn. They are one yarn on either side of a finishing machine.
The float in a knit
Five rungs of this anchor have taken the float to be a length of thread on the surface with nothing holding it down. A knit has one too, and it behaves the same way in the light and the opposite way in the hand — because a woven float lengthens its thread and a knitted one shortens its fabric.
Mercerising is a packing factor
Cotton held in caustic soda swells, and everything the treatment is famous for follows from one number in this site's diameter calculation. The lustre it is actually sold for does not, and saying which consequences are computed and which are not is the whole of the discipline here.
Twist and the twill line
The oldest rule of thumb in weaving says to weave a Z twill from S-twist warp for a bold line and from Z-twist warp for a subdued one. Both halves of it are geometry: the twill's angle comes from the two setts, the fibres' angle comes from the twist factor, and the rule is their difference.
Which satins are worth weaving
Manuals give the moves a satin admits as a list, as though the survivors were interchangeable. They are not. Measure how far apart the interlacings sit and the traditional counter turns out to be the best move at the orders a weaver mostly uses — and to fail first at thirteen, where the square root names four and five scatters further.
A calender spends the compression for good
Calendering was described here as moving a cloth from one thread-section model to another, which was right and had no number in it because the amount of the move was a free parameter. It is a pressure now — and the same nip setting turns out to give two cloths quite different treatments, because the force at a crossing is the pressure times the area a crossing owns.
A figure shows by its shine, not its step
A damask is one cloth in one colour and its pattern is plainly visible. This collection attributed that to the step in its surface — fifty micrometres of relief, computed from the interlacing rates. The step is real and returns almost no light. What makes the figure visible is that its crowns run at right angles to the ground's, so the two trade places when the cloth is turned.
A shadow stripe is two twists
A cloth striped in one colour, where the stripe is visible only because alternate bands are spun the other way round. The pattern is carried entirely by which way the fibres lie on the yarn's surface, and it disappears when the light moves.
Singeing is the cheapest change to a surface
Pass a cloth through a flame fast enough and it loses under one per cent of its mass. What it loses is the part of itself that was doing most of the touching, and lustre, friction, printability, pilling and measured cover all move at once.
The other crepe is in the yarn
A crepe weave puts the texture in the matrix. A crepe yarn puts it nowhere the matrix can see: the cloth is a plain weave, and the surface comes from a thread twisted so hard that it shortens by a seventh and spends the rest of its life trying to untwist.
A float reflects into a line
A cylinder cannot return a beam to a point. Its normals sweep the whole half-turn across it and nothing at all along it, so a straight thread throws light into a fan — seen as a highlight lying along the thread, exactly as long as the length of thread that is straight. The lobe of a satin is twice as narrow along the thread as across it; the lobe of a plain weave is exactly round.
Lustre is a length times a width
The specular area of a cloth factors exactly: a length of crown line, which the draft supplies, times a width of section within the tolerance, which the yarn and the finish supply. Neither factor knows anything about the other, and over the four-by-four catalogue the first alone spans a factor of sixty.
A calender buys the width
Press a cloth and its lustre multiplies by twenty-four. None of that comes from the length of its crowns, which moves by six per cent; all of it comes from their width, because a flattened section has a plane on top of it and a plane has one normal rather than a fan of them. The arithmetic refuses to put any of the gain in the other factor.
Turn the cloth and the shine changes hands
A warp crown's normals all lie in the plane across the warp and have no component along it, so a warp float can only mirror light that arrives from across the warp. Turn the cloth a quarter turn and the weft takes over. That is the whole of shot silk — a geometric effect with no dye that changes and no interference in it.
A hair layer veils a highlight
An eight-end satin's shine swings by a large factor as the cloth is turned, because a straight thread's normals lie in the plane across it. Put fibre ends on it and the swing disappears — not because the hairs block the light, which changes no contrast at all, but because they return light of their own that has no direction in it.
The folding rule is a surface angle
Fold at two thirds for two singles, six tenths for three, a half for four. Those are one over the square root of the fold count, they are what makes a fold's surface twist angle equal its singles', and all three of the trade's brackets contain the number exactly.
A calender works where nothing has been measured
This account has twice recorded that the missing piece is plasticity — what fraction of a flattening survives the nip. The piece is missing for a sharper reason than nobody having written it down. A calender's flattening is a shape strain, and at the lightest setting in this account's own series that is 11 per cent while cotton's elastic recovery is measured from 2 to 5. Six fibres of seven have no data at any setting the machine has, and wool reaches only the lightest. The law cannot be had from the measurements; what can be had is the bracket, and it is a factor of twenty-four.
A covered cloth cannot be calendered
A calender widens a section at conserved area, and a thread may widen until it meets its neighbours. So the flattening is capped by the cover the cloth already has — ×30 on a scrim, ×1.32 at a cover of nine tenths, and exactly one at full cover. The plateau a calender buys falls to nothing along with it, which makes the lustre a nip can add and the cloth's opacity the same constraint read twice: a cloth that cannot be seen through is a cloth a calender cannot help.
No cloth shines under a sky
Every specular figure on this account is drawn at a tolerance of two degrees, which is a stand-in for how wide the source is. Sweeping it says something the account has not: the contrast between a floated weave and a plain one is inversely proportional to the source's angular size, exactly, because a float keeps a crown line as the source narrows and a plain weave has only turns. A satin outshines a plain weave by 177 under the sun's disc, by 22 under a small lamp, and by exactly nothing at sixty degrees.
A calender's best cloth is the one its nip fills
A calender's lustre is a length of crown line times a width of plateau. A closer cloth has more crown line and less room to widen each thread into, and the product was expected to peak at some interior cover that would move with the weave. It does not peak at all on the cap alone — per unit of crown line it falls all the way from the most open cloth. The peak is made by the nip: a nip that flattens by f has one best cloth, the one it exactly fills, at a cover of d over the flattened width, and there the lustre is (f − 1)/f. No yarn, and no weave, moves it.
A room lights a satin at the harmonic mean of its lamps
A satin outshines a plain weave by a factor inversely proportional to the width of the light, which is a clean law for one source and says nothing about a room. A room has a lamp and a window at once. Sum each source's highlight and the average falls out by itself: the room behaves as a single source whose width is the harmonic mean of its sources' widths, weighted by the power each supplies. The harmonic mean is ruled by the narrowest source, so a small lamp carrying a tenth of the light more than doubles the contrast a large window gives.
A lamp off the mirror lights a satin only across its floats
Every source in the account of a room was a source the viewer sees mirrored in the cloth. A lamp off to one side lights the cloth too, and which facets it reaches depends on which way it is off. Displaced across a satin's floats it is caught by the float's own curve and adds contrast like any lamp on the mirror; displaced along them by more than twice its own width it reaches only the turns, and the satin comes out a quarter as bright as plain weave.
A satin mirrors the top of the sky
A uniform source sixty degrees wide leaves every weave reflecting the same share of its face, and that was read as saying no cloth shines under a sky. A real sky is not uniform. An overcast one is three times as bright overhead as at the horizon, and it stands over a ground darker than itself. Every facet of a cloth mirrors one direction, and a satin's facets mirror the top of the dome while a plain weave's mirror the horizon and the ground — so seen from above, under cloud, an eight-end satin still sends back a third more sky.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
Crown lineSpecular areaSpecular reflectionFloatCalenderingSatinRacetrackFloat lengthHelix angleYarn diameterCompression energyCover