Every essay
What cloth is
A fabric is a structure before it is a material. Interlacement, the draft as a matrix, and the question of whether a cloth holds together at all.
A fabric is a structure, not a material
Cotton is a material. Cloth is an arrangement, and almost everything a fabric does follows from how the threads are put together rather than from what they are made of.
The draft is a matrix
Point paper is not a diagram of cloth. It is a grid of yes-or-no decisions about which threads to lift, which makes a weave a binary matrix and almost every question about it arithmetic.
Does it hang together
A draft can interlace everywhere, have short floats, and describe two fabrics lying on each other rather than one. Nothing about the drawing says so, and the test that does is exact.
Weaves
Plain, twill and satin, and what actually separates them — float length, interlacing count, and a satin that cannot exist on six ends.
Plain, twill and satin
Three rules, and everything else in weaving is a variation on them. What separates the three is not appearance but one trade — how often a thread changes face against how far it runs when it does not.
The float decides
How far a thread runs on the face before it goes under is one number, and it sits behind lustre, drape, snagging, abrasion, tear strength and how densely the cloth can be set. Almost nothing else in the subject has that reach.
There is no satin on six ends
Weavers have known it as a rule for centuries. It is a theorem with a one-line proof about common factors, and it rules out four ends as well.
Interlacings and firmness
Every time a thread changes face it has to bend, and a bend takes room. That one sentence decides how densely a cloth can be set, how firm it feels, and why the two run in opposite directions.
Setting and geometry
Yarn diameter, crimp and cover. How close threads can be set, why thread count is not what it is taken for, and which model produced any number.
Thread count is not quality
It counts threads. It says nothing about how much of the cloth they cover, it can be inflated by counting plies, and it ranks fabrics in nearly the wrong order. The quantity it is mistaken for is cover factor, and that one is computable.
Crimp, and why cloth narrows when it is pulled
A thread in cloth is longer than the cloth it crosses. Pull the fabric one way and that extra length is taken out of one direction and put into the other, so the cloth gets narrower without a single fibre stretching.
How close can threads be set
There is a maximum. Push more threads into a cloth than the geometry allows and they simply will not go, and the limit depends on the weave as much as on the yarn.
Knits and other structures
Loops rather than crossings. Why a knit stretches without a bias, why stockinette curls, and why a dropped stitch runs while a woven cloth frays.
The loop
A knit is one thread bent into loops, each drawn through the loop below. Nothing in it is straight, which is why it stretches in every direction while a woven cloth stretches only at an angle.
Why stockinette curls
A knitted loop is not symmetric front to back. Work every course the same way and the asymmetries add up along the edges; alternate them and they cancel. That is the whole difference between a fabric that rolls and one that lies flat.
Ravel, fray and run
Cut a woven cloth and one thread comes loose. Break one loop in a knit and every loop above it follows. The two structures fail in opposite ways, and the reason is topology rather than strength.
Mechanics and drape
Cloth as a mechanism rather than a material. The bias, the angle at which threads jam, and why a flat sheet cannot cover a sphere.
The bias is a mechanism
Cloth cut at forty-five degrees stretches by a third and springs back, while the threads in it stretch by nothing at all. Almost every explanation given for this is wrong, and the right one is not about elasticity.
The locking angle
The bias runs out at an angle that yarn diameter and thread spacing decide between them. It is the number behind whether a cloth will go round a curve, and it has nothing to do with how strong the fabric is.
Why clothes need darts
A flat cloth goes round a cylinder for nothing and cannot go round a sphere at all without shearing. The amount of shear is decided by the curvature, and when it exceeds what the threads allow, something has to be cut out.
Pattern and colour
A draft is a periodic plane pattern with two states, so the symmetry is two-coloured. Colour order, and the things the eye reliably gets wrong.
Weaves as plane patterns
A draft is a periodic pattern with two states, so its symmetry is two-coloured. Some operations leave warp-up as warp-up and others exchange the two, and only a balanced weave has any of the second kind.
Colour and weave
Thread the same weave with a different order of coloured ends and a pattern appears that is nowhere in the draft. Houndstooth is an ordinary two-and-two twill, and nothing about its interlacement is unusual at all.
The diagonal is not a thread
A twill's diagonal is the most looked-at feature in weaving and the most misdescribed. No thread in the cloth runs diagonally. What runs diagonally is a pattern of which thread is on top, which is a different sort of object.