Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
The collection

Every essay — page 16

Page 16 of 23, continuing through the fields in the same order.

What cloth is Weaves Setting and geometry Knits and other structures Mechanics and drape Pattern and colour Compound and figured cloths After the loom Cloth doing a job

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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.

What an interlacing costs. Each weave's interlacing count beside the closest it can be set in the same yarn. The two run opposite ways, because a thread that changes face often has to bend often and a bend takes room.

The weave decides the sett, and two models disagree about it

Ashenhurst's rule and Peirce's geometry both answer how densely a cloth can be set, and for a plain weave they are fifteen per cent apart. Only one of them reaches the other weaves at all, and it is the cruder one.

6 figures · Sett Where the twenty-eight comes from. The setting a cotton cover factor of 28 prescribes, and the setting at which the threads would cover the surface geometrically, against yarn count. They are one curve: the trade's scale is Peirce's diameter with the units taken out. Below them is the sett at which each weave actually jams, which is a fixed fraction of it.

Where the cover factor comes from

A cotton cover factor is threads per inch over the root of the count, and the scale says twenty-eight means a covered surface. The twenty-eight is not a convention: it is the reciprocal of Peirce's yarn diameter, and the trade's practical ceilings of fourteen and twenty-two fall straight out of it.

6 figures · Cover Pull it lengthways and it narrows. The same cloth before and after a small extension along the warp. No thread has stretched: the extension came out of the warp crimp, that crimp went into the weft, and the fabric is narrower for it.

What crimp interchange actually conserves

Pull a cloth lengthways and it narrows, because the crimp moves from one system to the other. Inextensibility says that much and no more — it is one equation short of an answer, and the second equation everybody uses is an assumption with a name.

6 figures · Crimp Z twist at 800 turns per metre. A 20 tex cotton yarn, 0.167 mm across, with its surface fibres drawn as the helices they are. The angle between a surface fibre and the yarn's axis is 22.8°, and it is the only quantity in this family: the yarn is 4.1% shorter than the fibre in it and carries 85% of the strength the same fibre would give lying straight.

Twist is one angle

Every model of cloth treats a yarn as a cylinder with a diameter. It is a bundle of loose fibres, and what makes it behave like a cylinder is twist — which is a helix, so the whole subject is one angle, and the trade's twist factor turns out to be the only combination of count and turns that decides anything.

8 figures · Twist Z twill, Z twist. A square of cloth with two directions on it. The broad lines are the twill, whose angle 45.0° from the warp comes from the setts alone — 24 ends and 24 picks per centimetre. The fine lines are the surface fibres of the warp ends, at 25.3° from the warp because the yarn is twisted 900 turns per metre. Between them is 19.7°, and that is the whole of the rule.

Twist and the twill line

The oldest rule of thumb in weaving says to weave a Z twill from S-twist warp for a bold line and from Z-twist warp for a subdued one. Both halves of it are geometry: the twill's angle comes from the two setts, the fibres' angle comes from the twist factor, and the rule is their difference.

6 figures · Twist Every cloth at 150 grams. The counts and setts that all weigh 150 g/m² at a crimp of 7 per cent and a balance of 1. Hollow marks are past the jam — arithmetic rather than cloth. Among the 10 that can be woven the cover factor runs from 0.28 to 0.77, a factor of 2.77, and every one of them is the fabric the specification asked for.

What a fabric weighs

Every fabric is sold by its weight in grams per square metre, and the number is a sum of four products in which no term appears alone. One equation, four unknowns: a hundred and fifty grams describes an open coarse cloth and a close fine one, and the cover factors differ by a factor of nearly three.

6 figures · Weight The sett moves the flux and not the height. A 20 tex cotton yarn woven at every sett from 8 to 34 threads per centimetre. Above: the hole between the threads lifts from 27 to 234 mm as the cloth closes, while the space between the fibres lifts 6.37 m at every one of them — so the cloth's maximum is the flat line, and the sett does not touch it. Below: the permeability of those holes falls by a factor of 292 over the same range. Both curves are monotone, so there is no optimum — only an interval, ending at the jam at 34.6 threads per centimetre.

The sett decides how much, not how high

Every essay on wicking so far has found the sett deciding something. This one finds it deciding nothing at all: a cloth's maximum rise is 6.37 m at eight threads per centimetre and 6.37 m at thirty-four, because the sett cannot reach inside a yarn.

6 figures · Sett The reed is not the sett. Twelve ends held at the reed's pitch above and at the cloth's pitch below, for a sheeting whose weft crimp is 14.61 per cent. The count is the same in both rows and only the spacing changes: the cloth is 12.75 per cent narrower, so a reed at 24.43 ends per centimetre produces a cloth at 28. The crimp comes from the Peirce solution at this cloth's quoted construction.

The reed is not the sett

A reed holds the warp at a pitch, and the cloth that leaves it is narrower — by exactly the weft's crimp, with nothing fitted and nothing approximated. On a close balanced sheeting that is 12.75 per cent, on an open scrim 1.87, and a weaver who allowed one figure for both would be wrong by a factor of nearly seven.

6 figures · Take-up What the two setts can be set to. Two rules on one scale from 8 to 40 threads per centimetre. The upper carries the 49 warp setts a metric reed catalogue reaches at one to four ends per dent; the lower carries the 4825 pick densities a change-wheel take-up reaches. The mean spacing is 0.656 threads per centimetre in the warp and 0.0066 in the weft, a ratio of 99. The widest gap in the reed's range is 2.10 threads per centimetre.

The setts a loom can reach

Transposing a draft gives a perfectly good draft, and every count this site takes off a matrix either is symmetric under exchanging warp and weft or has a mirror twin. The loom is not symmetric at all: over the range ordinary cloth is woven in, it can choose a pick density 99 times more finely than a warp sett — and the warp sett cannot be changed once the warp is drawn in, at any granularity whatever.

6 figures · Take-up The energy well, and where the cloth sits in it. The bending energy of a sheeting at every state on its own constant-thread-length locus, plotted against how the crimp divides between the two systems. The minimum is at 1.22 and the value every Peirce solution here is drawn at is 1.00, marked. The well's depth decides how firmly the ratio is settled, which is why an open scrim's measured crimp scatters and a close sheeting's does not. What the plot cannot show is the friction that stops a cloth reaching the bottom, which turns the minimum into a band.

The crimp ratio is not a measurement

Peirce's geometry is two thread systems, four unknowns and three equations. It cannot say how the crimp divides between warp and weft, so every cloth solved so far has been drawn at a ratio somebody chose. Give the threads a stiffness and the missing equation arrives — and for six of the eight cloths in the table it arrives with no material constant in it at all.

7 figures · Crimp The beat-up, at the fell. The last picks of a sheeting at 26 picks per centimetre, with the beat-up zone shaded. Driving the fell forward makes the warp take more crimp and more crimp takes more thread, which the warp can only supply by stretching — so the force is the warp tension times the crimp's elasticity with respect to the pick spacing, 0.182 here. That is 0.205 N per end and 573 N per metre of reed. What the drawing cannot show is that the shaded band's width cancels out of the derivation exactly; it is drawn because a reader needs to see what is being compressed, not because the answer depends on it.

The blow that sets the pick

The take-up gear decides how far the cloth moves between picks and says nothing about the blow that puts each pick where it goes. That blow is a force, and a virtual-work argument gives it in one line — with the length of the beat-up zone cancelling out of the answer exactly, which is the part worth having.

7 figures · Beat-up Selectable against reachable. How far up the take-up gear's catalogue a beat-up force reaches, on a sheeting. The catalogue holds 4,825 distinct pick densities between 8 and 40 per centimetre, which is the previous rung's count of what the machine can select. At 200 N per metre only 548 of them can be woven; at 2,000 it is 4,256. The fineness of the choice is untouched by the ceiling and the top of the range is cut off entirely, so the weft direction's advantage is resolution rather than reach. What the chart cannot show is the loom's own force, which depends on the beat-up mechanism and is not a property of the cloth.

A pick density is a force budget

The take-up ladder counted what a change-wheel take-up can select: 4,825 distinct pick densities between eight and forty threads per centimetre, against forty-nine warp setts a reed catalogue offers over the same range. That count assumed every setting is available. A beat-up force says otherwise, and cuts the top off the range without touching the fineness of the choice.

6 figures · Beat-up A crossing before and after it is pressed. One warp end of a sheeting riding over three picks, drawn twice to the same scale. Unpressed, both sections are circles and the cloth is 0.388 mm thick. At 0.42 N per crossing the sections flatten to aspect ratios of 1.79 and 1.88, the cloth thins to 0.260 mm, and the warp runs flat for 0.113 mm over each pick before it begins to curve. What the drawing cannot show is why the cloth does not do this by itself: flattening shrinks the arc radius as well as the crimp height, so it costs bending energy, and a relaxed cloth keeps its threads round.

Peirce and Kemp are one cloth at two moments

This site has run two thread sections side by side since the setting field was built — a circle and a flattened racetrack — and said honestly that they disagree and that the disagreement is the point. They are not rival descriptions of the same fabric. They are descriptions of the same fabric before and after something pressed it, and the difference between them is a pressure that can now be named.

6 figures · Sett The crimp ratios a dense shirting can have. Poplins in 15 tex warp and 20 tex weft at 22 picks, from 32 ends per centimetre to 52. Each bar is the interval of warp-to-weft crimp ratios the construction admits at all: the warp must supply at least the thickness the weft cannot reach, and at most what it can reach itself. The rule at one is this site's standing default. It sits inside the interval up to 44.18 ends per centimetre and outside it beyond — so for a dense shirting an equal division of the crimp is not merely the wrong assumption but a geometric impossibility. The 44-end poplin the standard cloth table called impossible for a long time sits a fifth of an end below that limit, which is why the solver failed on it: its feasible interval was real and narrow, and a bisection on the whole range walked away from it.

The cloth that was called impossible

This site's own table of fabrics carries a note saying a real 44-end poplin has no solution in its geometry at all, and that the poplin row was therefore set at 32 ends. The cloth solves. What had no solution was the search — a bisection that treated a state it could not reach as evidence of having gone too far, and walked away from the answer every time.

6 figures · Crimp The two halves of a beat-up force. The force the reed must apply per metre, for a sheeting, against the number of picks that are still sliding against the warp. The elastic half — the warp tension times the crimp's elasticity with respect to the pick spacing — is 573 N/m and does not depend on the zone at all; that cancellation is exact and is the result the rung below established. The frictional half is 1133 N/m per sliding pick and is nothing but zone. Against a reported 400–1500 N/m, that leaves room for at most 0.82 picks sliding — so the fell region a weaver can see, ten to fifty picks deep, is not the same quantity as the picks that are still moving. What the rows cannot show is that this is a static friction throughout, and a beat-up is a blow.

The half of the beat-up that is all zone

The elastic half of the beat-up force is exact and the length of the beat-up zone cancels out of it, which is this site's own result and disagrees with every practical account of weaving. The frictional half is nothing but zone — and requiring the total to match the force a loom is actually built to apply puts the number of picks still sliding at about one.

6 figures · Beat-up Cover, dry and wetted. Warp cover for every cloth in the table when its threads swell by 20% and its spacings are held, with the dry value and the sett at which the swollen threads touch beside each bar. Cover is a diameter over a spacing and only the diameter moves, so every cover is multiplied by exactly 1.20 and every jamming sett divided by it — an identity rather than a result, and the one statement in this ladder a reader can check by hand. No cloth here reaches a cover of one, so none of them jams laterally on wetting; the closest is the sheeting at 0.628. What the bars cannot show is the through-thickness condition, which the sheeting fails at a swelling of half this one.

A wet cloth is set closer than it was woven

Cover is a diameter over a spacing. Wetting moves the diameter and does not move the spacing, so every cover factor is multiplied by exactly the swelling ratio and every jamming sett divided by it — which is an identity, and the one statement in this ladder a reader can check by hand.

7 figures · Sett Shrinkage from wetting, cloth by cloth. The change in each cloth's relaxed construction when its threads swell by 20% across and 1.2% along. Both states are least-energy states of their own constant-thread-length locus, which is the only comparison the locus admits: its minimum is a state at its own sett, so it may be compared with another minimum and not with a quoted construction. Positive is smaller. Every cloth that has a wet state closes up except the cheesecloth, which opens by half a per cent because the fibre's extra hundredth of length outruns the extra crimp a thicker partner costs. What the bars cannot show is the three cloths that are missing, which have no wet state at all.

Wetting moves a cloth to another locus

A cloth's constant-thread-length locus is built at a fixed thickness. Swelling changes the thickness, so a wetted cloth is not somewhere else on its own locus — it is on a different one, and the distance between the two least-energy states is the shrinkage. Five of the eight cloths here have a wet state, and one of them gets bigger.

6 figures · Crimp How far each cloth's sett moves between the loom and the finished state. A cloth on the loom is held: the warp is under beam tension and the picks are driven up at whatever density the take-up says. Let it go and it relaxes to the least-energy state of its own locus, which is a state at a different sett. The bars are how far each sett moves, and they always move in opposite directions because there is one locus: warp ends per centimetre fall as the cloth widens and picks per centimetre rise as it shortens. Seven of the eight move a little over one per cent; the poplin, whose two counts and two setts are the only unbalanced pair in the table, moves six and ten. What the bars cannot show is what a designer does with them, which is that the two numbers a specification quotes are not two free numbers — the finished construction is a point on a one-dimensional curve.

The construction a loom must be set to

A specification quotes ends and picks per centimetre in the finished cloth, and a loom is set to neither of them. The cloth relaxes to the least-energy state of its own locus, which is a state at a different sett — and because the locus is one curve, the two numbers a specification quotes are not two free numbers.

7 figures · Take-up Where Poiseuille's rule starts being true of a cloth. Every account of a fabric's air permeability quotes the fourth power: flow down a channel goes as the fourth power of its width, so a small change of sett is a large change of flow. That is Poiseuille's result and it is about the viscous drop. A channel through a cloth is about as long as it is wide and the air in it is moving fast, so most of the pressure goes on giving that air its kinetic energy instead — and the inertial term does not depend on the hole's size at all. Plotted against cover, the viscous share of the drop runs from 1.0 per cent in an open muslin to 61.6 in a close one, passing half at a cover of 0.571. Quoting the fourth power alone below that is wrong by a factor rather than by a correction: at the open end it overstates the flow 98-fold.

The fourth power is a close cloth's rule

Every account of a fabric's air permeability quotes the same thing: flow down a channel goes as the fourth power of its width, so a small change of sett is a large change of flow. That is Poiseuille's result, it is about the viscous drop, and in an open cloth the viscous drop is two per cent of the pressure. The rule becomes true as the cloth closes, and where it starts being true is a number.

6 figures · Permeability How open a muslin is, against where the light is. One minus the cover is a cloth's openness to a light directly behind it, and for this muslin it is 37.9 per cent. Move off the normal and a line of sight has to clear the hole at the top of the cloth and the same hole one thickness below, so what it can use falls as t·tan α is taken off each side — reaching nothing at 36.1° across the ends. Averaged over the whole sky with Lambert's cosine weighting, the cloth is 5.36 per cent open — 7.1 times less than the covering rule says, and the whole of the difference is the thickness. One minus the cover is the openness of a cloth with no thickness, and no cloth has none.

One minus the cover is a cloth with no thickness

The covering rule says a cloth's openness is one minus its cover factor, and this collection derived it and has used it ever since. It is the answer for a light directly behind the cloth. Move the light and a line of sight has to clear the hole at the top of the fabric and the same hole one thickness below, so the openness falls, and it reaches nothing at thirty-six degrees. Averaged over the whole sky a muslin is a seventh as open as the rule says.

6 figures · Cover Where a muslin's air goes, as the cloth is set closer. A permeability computed from the average hole says nothing about which holes the air uses, and once the holes have a spread the answer is: not many of them. Two curves, both over the same population of holes — the share of the flow carried by the widest tenth, and how few of the holes carry half of it. At 16 ends per centimetre the cloth is nearly democratic: the widest tenth takes 12% and half the air needs 45% of the holes. At 44 the widest tenth takes 53% and half the air goes through 8.8%. Both inputs move together as the cloth closes — the spread in the holes rises because the spacing is fixed and the diameter is not, and the exponent rises because the pressure drop stops being inertial — so the concentration rises faster than either.

Half the air goes through a tenth of the holes

A permeability computed from the average hole says nothing about which holes the air uses. Once the threads have a spread, the answer is: not many of them — and in a close cloth, half the flow leaves through less than a tenth of the openings.

7 figures · Permeability Where a muslin's warp jams, over 40 ends. 40 ends drawn at their own diameters, with every neighbouring pair's combined width plotted beneath. A cloth cannot be set closer than its threads will lie, and the pair that decides that is not the average pair — it is the widest one anywhere across the warp, which here is ends 8 and 9 at 205 µm apiece against a mean of 167 µm. Over the 2000 ends of a real warp rather than the 40 drawn here the worst pair is 42% above the mean, and it goes on growing with the width of the cloth: the same yarn in a wider loom jams sooner. The naive estimate that treats every window as an independent try overstates it by 0.48%, which is small enough to say that the overlap between neighbouring windows is not what is going on here.

A warp jams where its threads are thickest

The closest a cloth can be set is decided by its worst pair of neighbours, not its average thread — and the worst pair depends on how many pairs there are. The same yarn in a wider loom jams sooner, which makes a jammed sett a property of the machine as well as of the yarn.

7 figures · Sett 20 tex, counted. The cross-section of a 20 tex cotton yarn, with every fibre in it drawn. The count is a division and nothing else: a 20 tex yarn spun from 0.17 tex fibre has 117.6 fibres crossing any plane through it, and the yarn is 14.0 fibre diameters across because n fibres packed at 0.6 fill a circle √(n/φ) times as wide. The arrangement is drawn on a lattice and is not claimed: real fibres are not on one, they migrate between the core and the surface as they run, and everything this collection says about a yarn's strength turns on their doing so.

How many fibres make a thread

Every number in this collection began with a diameter, and a diameter is not a measurement — it is a count of fibres, divided. Once the division is written down, three quantities that had nothing to do with each other turn out to be the same number.

6 figures · Assembly The evenness a cotton yarn cannot be better than. Lay staple fibres down at random and count how many cross a plane: the count is Poisson, its variance is its mean, and the coefficient of variation of the mass per unit length is therefore 1/√n with no material and no machine in it. The lower curve is that floor. At 5 tex there are 29 fibres in the section and the floor is 19.86 per cent; at 5 tex there are 29 and it is 19.86. The upper curve is what a yarn spun at an index of irregularity of 1.35 actually measures, which is the floor times a constant — so the whole shape belongs to the counting and none of it to the spinning. The exponent is exactly −½ and is asserted as such rather than fitted to the curve.

A finer yarn is a worse yarn

Fineness is the thing a yarn is priced for, and it is bought with irregularity at a fixed exchange rate. Once the spread is a function of the count, every correction this collection computes becomes a function of the count too — and the cheapest yarn on the shelf is the one the arithmetic describes best.

6 figures · Assembly