Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Field

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.
plainfloat 1 · 8 interlacingsfirmness 1.002/2 twillfloat 2 · 16 interlacingsfirmness 0.505-end satinfloat 4 · 20 interlacingsfirmness 0.40a filled square means the warp is on the facecounted from the matrices, not from the pictures

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.

 2/2 twilllongest float 216 interlacings per repeat1 separable clothrepeat 4 × 4generated, then counted4×4

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.

 the bars mark which separable cloth each thread belongs toan ordinary 2/2 twillone clothevery end and pick interlacestwo separable clothsconnectivity of the above-and-below relation, computed

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.

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