Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Shaping — where it appears

Making a knitted panel change width by transferring loops, so its edge steps by whole wales at whole courses. Whole wales at whole courses means the achievable edge angles are quantised, and the set of them is the same for every knit.

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

A fashioned edge at 1 wales in 2 courses. A knitted panel narrowing by 1 wale every 2 courses, drawn at the fabric's own aspect: a wale is 1.2791 times as wide as a course is tall, which is Munden's ratio of the two published constants. The edge therefore stands at 32.60 degrees from the wale, and that angle is the same in every yarn, at every gauge and at every loop length. Marks show where the 8 transfers fall.

A fashioned edge has a quantised angle

A knitted panel is shaped by transferring loops, so its edge steps by whole wales at whole courses and its angle is the arctangent of a fraction. The available angles turn out to be the same for every plain knit there has ever been — in any yarn, at any gauge, at any loop length — because the constant they scale by cancels the loop out. There are eighteen of them, and 16.67° between the last two.

knits · Shaping How far a tube can be tapered by its loop. The same 10 wales by 10 courses of plain knit at the two ends of the usable loop range for a 20 tex yarn — 3.44 mm at the loose end and 2.80 mm at the tight one — drawn at a common scale in centimetres. On 240 needles the circumference falls from 192.0 cm to 156.0 cm, a taper of 18.8 per cent, and the fabric becomes 1.51 times as dense.

A tube can only be shaped by its loop

On a circular machine the needle count is the cylinder, so a seamless tube's circumference is its wale count times its wale spacing — and the wale spacing is the loop length over one constant. The loop is the only free quantity, the yarn bounds it at both ends, and what is left is a taper of 18.8 per cent bought at the price of a fabric half again as dense.

knits · Shaping

Named alongside it

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

Loop lengthMunden constantsWaleCircular knittingCourseFashioningFully-fashionedLoop aspectNeedle countQuantisationSeamlessStitch density

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