Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Reversal — where it appears

A point at which a twill changes direction, which turns a diagonal into a chevron or a diamond. It costs shafts and it can break the cloth, because a narrow reversal leaves floats long enough for whole regions to stop interlacing with one another.

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

A 2/2 threading, run out to three widths. The same four shafts threaded for repeats of increasing width. The threading line runs up and back down; the harness never grows, and the number of ends it carries is bounded by the loom's width rather than by its shafts.

The harness does not grow

Nearly every account of a loom says the shaft count limits the repeat. It limits the repeat of a straight draw, and of nothing else — a reversed twill on ninety-six ends weaves on the same four shafts as the twill it was made from, and the ratio grows without bound.

fancy · Shafts 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 How many twills there are. Every way of writing a twill on each repeat, reduced by the two operations that leave the cloth unchanged: starting on a different pick, and turning it over. What is left is the number a designer actually chooses between.

How many twills a repeat admits

Sixty-four ways of writing a twill on eight ends, and twenty-one twills. The difference is two operations that leave the cloth unchanged, and a catalogue that does not quotient by them is counting notations rather than fabrics.

weaves · Foundation weaves

Named alongside it

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

RepeatTwillBroken twillCompositionCracked lineEquivalenceFloatFloat lengthHarnessHerringboneShaftsThreading

All concepts