Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Concept

Tricot — where it appears

The simplest warp-knitted structure, two guide bars lapping in opposite directions. The opposite lapping is what ties the wales together, and a single bar lapping alone gives chains that fall apart into separate strings.

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

The tricot lapping. A warp-knit lapping drawn from the guide bar's movement. Each thread is coloured by the group of wales it belongs to, so a lapping that leaves the wales independent shows as several colours. This one joins them into 1 group.

Warp knitting, which is a different thing entirely

Every wale has its own thread, and if the thread never leaves its wale the fabric is a set of independent cords. Whether a lapping makes cloth is decided by a coprimality condition — the satin theorem, in a knit.

knits · Warp knit What a second guide bar buys. Independent fabrics left by each lapping across 12 wales, counted by walking the wale graph and checked against the greatest common divisor of the shogs with the width. A bar that leaves more than one is not making cloth; a second bar can put right what the first could not.

What a second guide bar is for

One warp-knit bar leaves the wales in as many independent fabrics as its shog shares factors with the width. Two bars leave the greatest common divisor of both — so a pair of shogs that each fail alone can succeed together, and a pair that share a factor cannot.

knits · Warp knit One repeat of two patterned fabrics, pulled two ways. One twelve-course repeat of a two-bar warp knit, each band a course drawn at its spacing and its kind: two tricot underlaps, two satin, or one of each. With the bars coincident the repeat is two bands, and narrowed to four fifths of its width the satin band opens to +150% while the tricot band opens to +26%; widened a fiftieth the satin band closes by −36% and the tricot band by −3%. Opposed, every course is the mixed kind and every course moves alike, by the smaller opening and the larger closing. The bands are drawn at the fabric's width to scale. What the drawing cannot show is the loops, held fixed here.

Opposed bars even a warp knit by locking it

Two patterning bars knitting the same stripe can be set so that each bar's long underlaps fall where the other's are short. Neither bar's stroke changes, and every course then carries the same total yarn — but that is not why the cloth comes out even. Every course pairs a long underlap with a short one, the long one stops the width and the short one stops the length, and so every course gives like the stiffer bar in both directions. The evenness is bought with the stripe's give.

knits · Warp knit

Named alongside it

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

LappingWarp knittingWaleAnisotropyCloth integrityConnectivityGreatest common divisorTensile locusThread length

All concepts