Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Mispick — where it appears

A weaving fault in which one pick is lifted with the wrong shafts or thrown twice, leaving a row of the cloth that differs from the draft. It runs the whole width of the piece, so it can be dodged along a bolt but never across it.

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

One pick of a 2/2 twill made in the wrong shed. Pick 2 of a 2/2 twill laid in the shed belonging to another pick. The thread is there, it is beaten up in its place, and it is simply not the pick the design asked for — so the fault is a bar the whole width of the cloth and one pick deep. This one leaves the cloth sound, with its longest float at 3. Across every four-by-four draft and every possible wrong shed — 1,372,440 substitutions — 63.2% leave a cloth that still hangs together, 36.6% leave a thread loose, and 0.25% split the cloth. The same wrong shed is harmless in one draft and destroys another, so nothing about the size of the mistake predicts the size of the fault.

A mispick is one row in the wrong place

Every four-by-four draft, with each of its picks replaced by every shed the loom could have made instead: a million and a third substitutions. Two thirds leave a cloth that still hangs together, a third leave a thread held by nothing, and the same wrong shed is harmless in one draft and fatal in another.

weaves · Derivation A bolt in plan with all three, cut three ways. The first 9 metres of a 50-metre bolt 1500 mm wide, drawn in plan with its length across the page. Over its whole length it carries 23 point faults, 8 weft bars across the width, 1 warp streak along the length, the streak at 911 mm across. Panels are 450 by 900 mm, 3 across with 150 mm to spare. Over the whole bolt the three markers yield 80, 95 and 145 sound panels of 165: rigid tiles; the same lanes cut around their faults along the piece; and lanes also placed across the width wherever the faults leave room.

The width of a bolt is worth what its faults leave it

A fault map lets a cutter move panels along a bolt and across it, and the length was expected to matter far more than the width, because a bolt is fifty metres long and three panels wide. That is true of two kinds of fault and false of the third. Against a fault across the whole width the width is worth exactly nothing; against a scatter of points it is worth between a sixth and two fifths of what the length is; and against a missing end, which runs the whole length, the length is worth nothing and the width is worth everything.

applied · Faults

Named alongside it

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

Cloth integrityEnumerationFaultFault mapFloat lengthLoose endMarkerMissing endPanelShedWeave matrixYield

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