The collection

Every essay — page 22

Page 22 of 22, 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

Fields Series Threads Weave index Refutations Concepts Search

Compound and figured cloths

Double cloth, pile, leno, and the loom that decides what can exist. Where a fabric stops being one binary matrix — a third thread system, a warp order that changes between picks — and where the integrity criterion runs out and friction takes over.

$The springs a leno easer can be. The stiffest spring, per end, that an easer can carry without any span of the crossing end rising above an ordinary end's working tension at any fraction of the crossed shed, against how far its preload sits above the warp's resting tension of 0.5 N. Behind the harness, where an easing bar acts, it is 1.1 N/m at a preload equal to the resting tension and falls to nothing by 15 per cent above it; in front of the harness it is 4.8 N/m. Everything under a curve works and nothing above it does. The window is a corner: a spring barely stiffer than a dead weight, with a preload matched to the warp's own tension. What the chart cannot show is the bar's mass, which the loom's speed makes matter and which the next views take up.$

A leno easer should be a light weight

A spring easer gives length when the crossing end pulls, so it cannot give it too early, which was the fault in a cam driven off the shed. The question left was its rate. The answer is that it hardly has one. Behind the harness the easer feels the back span, and two gripping eyes keep that span within fifteen per cent of its resting tension while the kink carries its load. So the spring must hold its span almost constant over a sixty-eight-millimetre stroke: at most 1.1 newtons a metre per end, a dead weight in all but name. At speed the bar's own mass is what limits it, and it falls with the square of the loom's speed: 2.3 grams an end at a hundred picks a minute, 0.6 at two hundred.

6 figures · Leno

Which loose pieces in a cut tuft are free at once. A cut-pile tuft 12 mm tall on a 2 mm base, spun from a 90 mm staple, with a seeded sample of its fibre pieces drawn along the yarn and the tip's untwisted run-out, 5.6 mm, shaded down each leg. 22 pieces pass under the binding pick; of the 9 that lie wholly in one leg, 3 lie wholly inside the run-out, where the twist presses on nothing, and are free at once; the other 6 reach down into twisted yarn and are held until wear opens the twist further. What the drawing cannot show is the run-out's edge, which is a fall in pressure rather than a line.

A cut pile sheds in two stages

Every cut tuft of staple yarn holds loose fibre pieces that nothing anchors but the twist, and at the tip the twist holds nothing: it runs out over a length the grip arithmetic already gives, five and a half millimetres in a wool carpet yarn. A loose piece lying wholly inside that run-out is free the day the carpet is laid; one reaching below it is held until walking opens the tip's twist. So the reservoir drains in two stages, and the pile height decides the split. A velvet sheds everything it will ever shed at once. A twelve-millimetre wool carpet sheds a fifth of its reservoir at once and four fifths later. A shag sheds almost nothing at first and fourteen per cent of its fibre eventually.

5 figures · Pile