Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Tartan — where it appears

A check woven with the same colour order in the warp and the weft, usually pivoted so that the order runs out and back. Because the weft order has to be thrown by shuttles, a tartan's sett decides which looms can weave it as well as how it looks.

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

A tartan sett in 2/2 twill. A pivoted sett of 70 threads used in both systems, which is what makes a tartan a tartan rather than a check. On the left, the cloth at block scale: the squares on the diagonal have one colour in both systems and the rest are mixtures. On the right, one mixture rectangle at thread scale, where the weave decides. In 2/2 twill the reflection survives on 50.0 per cent of a mixture's intersections, against a ceiling of 75 per cent that no weave can reach. The three tints stand for the three colours of the sett and carry no other meaning here.

A check is two stripes and a tartan is one

A tartan is quoted as one sett of thread counts because the warp and the weft carry the same order. That is said to make it symmetric about its diagonal, and the arithmetic says it cannot be — the ceiling is three quarters, and a 2/2 twill reaches one half.

pattern · Stripe Two weft colour orders thrown on a loom with boxes at one side. Weft colour orders thrown pick by pick on a shuttle loom that picks alternately from the two sides. For an order with runs of four, two, two and four, every throw finds a shuttle of its colour on the side it leaves from, so the order can be woven. For an order with runs of three and three, pick 4 has to be thrown from the right in a colour whose shuttle is on the other side, and the order cannot be woven. On a loom with boxes at one side the box opposite holds only the shuttle just thrown, which the next pick must throw straight back, so colour can change only between pairs of picks. What the drawing cannot show is the mechanism that drops the boxes, which decides how fast a change can be made but not which changes are possible.

A weft stripe is counted in pairs of picks

A warp's colour order is laid out once at warping and the loom never has to think about it. A weft's is thrown, one pick at a time, by shuttles that cross the cloth and stay where they land. On a loom with boxes at one side that makes every coloured band an even number of picks; with boxes at both sides it admits odd bands and pays for them in shuttles; and a tartan, which uses one order in both directions, is designed for its weft whether its designer knew it or not.

pattern · Stripe The named colour-and-weave effects, sorted by the loom their weft needs. Each named colour-and-weave effect with the shortest band in its colour order and the cheapest loom that can throw that order in the weft, on a loom with 4 boxes a side. end-and-end, runs of 1 and 1, needs picking at will; hairline, runs of 1 and 1, needs picking at will; log cabin, runs of 1 and 1, needs picking at will; tattersall, runs of 1 and 9, needs picking at will; birdseye, runs of 2 and 2, needs boxes at one side; crow's foot, runs of 2 and 2, needs boxes at one side; step pattern, runs of 2 and 1, needs boxes at both sides; three-and-one, runs of 3 and 1, needs picking at will; houndstooth, runs of 4 and 4, needs boxes at one side; shepherd's check, runs of 6 and 6, needs boxes at one side; gun club, runs of 4 and 4 and 4 and 4, needs boxes at one side; glen check, runs of 4 and 4 and 4 and 4 and 2 and 2 and 2 and 2, needs boxes at one side. The warp costs nothing, because a colour order in the warp is laid out once at warping; the weft is thrown one pick at a time by shuttles that stay where they land, so an effect's price is its weft order alone. What the bars cannot show is the pattern, which is in neither the order nor the weave but in what they make of each other.

The finest colour-and-weave effects need the rarest loom

A houndstooth, a shepherd's check and a gun club check are thrown by the cheapest shuttle loom there is. A hairline, an end-and-end and a log cabin are thrown by none — a colour on every other pick is thrown from the same side every time, so its shuttles pile up at the far end of the loom and never come back. The dividing line is the parity of the bands and nothing else, which is why it survives the fact that no two sources agree about how wide a shepherd's check is.

pattern · Stripe

Named alongside it

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

CensusCheckColour and weaveColour orderPivoted settStripeBalanceBlind intersectionCollisionFaceShaftsTranspose

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