Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
How this site is made

The figure library

Every picture here is generated from code rather than drawn by hand. This is the list of generators, grouped by family, with how many essays call each one — which is both the reuse this collection lives on and the blast radius of changing one.

No figure on this site is a drawing that was made once and saved. Each one is a function: it takes parameters and returns SVG, so the same generator produces the five-end satin and the twelve-end satin without either being redrawn.

That is the reason the collection can keep growing without the illustrations drifting apart. A generator is written once, checked once, and every essay that calls it inherits the same line weights, the same colour roles, and the same behaviour in dark mode. There are 143 of them, and between them 450 essays call them 841 times.

The count beside each name is how many essays instantiate it, because that number is the one worth watching. A generator written for a single essay and never called again is a design failure rather than a neutral cost: the whole economy of this collection is that a picture drawn for one argument turns out to be the picture for six, and reusecheck fails the build when the average drops. It is also the blast radius — changing a generator changes every figure on its page at once, which is what has to be rebuilt and looked at before the change is believed.

Drafts on point paper

The weaves themselves, each generated from its own rule and then measured — 6 generators.

Whether the cloth is one cloth

The check this site exists to make, and the failure a draft cannot show — 3 generators.

The counting side

Which satins exist, how many, and why six ends has none — 5 generators.

Cloth in section

Crimp, cover and how close threads may be set, once the yarn has a diameter — 4 generators.

Cloth as a mechanism

Inextensible threads free to rotate where they cross — the bias, shear and tear — 4 generators.

Loops rather than crossings

One thread bent through the loop below, and everything that follows from it — 3 generators.

Knitting the other way round

A thread per wale coming down the cloth, and the two things that follow — 2 generators.

What the eye makes of the surface

Colour orders threaded into a draft, and patterns the interlacement never hints at — 3 generators.

Counts, diameters, and the models that disagree

Where a number stops coming out of a matrix and starts coming out of an assumption — 4 generators.

Stiffness, and the tests that measure it

The cantilever and the drapemeter, which answer different questions and are quoted as one — 4 generators.

Not two straight thread systems

The braid and the nonwoven, which fail the site's own criterion in opposite ways — 3 generators.

Three thread systems

Pile, terry and leno — the constructions a binary matrix cannot hold — 5 generators.

The loom

The first thing here that is not the cloth, and what it decides can exist — 4 generators.

Counted, then drawn as rows

One generator, one drawing rule, and every enumeration this site runs — 1 generator.

The cloth changing size

Two states of one fabric, and the crimp that is the whole distance between them — 4 generators.

The cloth changing character

The yarn flattened, the fibre swollen, the floats raised, and the fibres entangled — 5 generators.

Cloth built to be filled

The flat tow, the crimp it cannot avoid, and a thickness that is not a repeat — 3 generators.

Cloth doing a job

The hole, the pressure, the cut, the seam — and the interval a specification leaves — 5 generators.

The surface rather than the interlacement

Relief, crepe and mock leno — where what a reader sees is not in the draft — 4 generators.

Two grids, and the third thing between them

The beat a second grid makes, whether it is a second ply or the reed — 3 generators.

The knit as an array

Knit, tuck and miss — three symbols where a weave has two, and the same question — 1 generator.

Inside the thread

The helix that makes a bundle of loose fibres behave like a cylinder — 2 generators.

Two cloths at once, and the edge that decides which two

The selvedge the repeat cannot see, where a stitch may hide, and how many cloths a repeat can hold — 2 generators.

A cloth deforming at constant thread length

The whole curve of states a cloth can reach when no yarn changes length, and its slope — 2 generators.

Two beds, and the yarn that runs between them

A float that lies in the gap, a fabric that turns out to be two, and the one number nobody measured — 2 generators.

One cloth, more than one weave

The stripe, the check and the cord — three partitions, and the arithmetic at the join — 2 generators.

Cloth as a wick, and the two pore systems it wicks with

The hole between the threads, the spaces between the fibres, and the gap between them — 2 generators.

A figure on a ground, and the boundary between them

One weave inside a region and another outside it, and where that breaks the cloth — 3 generators.

The loom as a machine with dimensions

The shed, the harness, the reed — the first things here with a millimetre in them — 2 generators.

A knitted panel shaped rather than cut

Whole wales at whole courses, and the angles that leaves available — 2 generators.

The catalogue, and what is supposed to generate it

Three basic weaves, the operations on them, and how little of the catalogue they reach — 2 generators.

A film over a fabric, and the hole it has to bridge

What a coating adds, what it takes away, and which of the two gives first — 2 generators.

The yarn as something that resists

The first force on this site — what a thread's stiffness is, and the four places it decides something — 2 generators.

The crossing squashed

A section that is flat because something pressed it, and the pressure that can be read back out — 2 generators.

What holds a thread in

Friction along a gripped length rather than at a point, and the two coefficients a cloth has — 2 generators.

The cloth with water in it

A fibre grows across itself and not along, and every ratio this site is built out of moves — 2 generators.

What a cloth does not give back

Two routes to a strain, and the one that comes back is the one with no fibre in it — 4 generators.

The channel a cloth has, drawn through its thickness rather than in plan

The hole every earlier figure drew from above, cut open — and the waist that is not the opening — 2 generators.

The measurements: everything a cloth passes, plotted against whatever varies it

Air, light, heat and water against sett, cover, angle, registration and loop length — 1 generator.

One thread against many: what a distribution does to a number computed from a mean

The population behind every diameter this site has used, and the three ways it changes an answer — 2 generators.

A draft with something wrong in it, and the shape the mistake leaves in the cloth

A missing end, a wrong shed, a reversed lift — each applied to every draft there is — 2 generators.

Inside the thread, counted: the fibres, the floor they set and the grip that holds them

One division — how many fibres are in the section — and the evenness, the stiffness and the strength that follow from it — 2 generators.

A yarn made of yarns: what the folding takes out of the singles and puts round them

Folding untwists, exactly; and what that costs, what it buys and what it leaves alone — 2 generators.

The outside of the cloth: its height field, and everything read off it

Where the cloth stops — the crowns, the curve that ranks them, and the thickness, contact, wear and coating that are five readings of one surface — 3 generators.

Where a cloth sends a ray: the normals of its surface, and the highlight they make

A crown line times a section's width, which is why the draft owns the length of a highlight and the finish owns its breadth — 2 generators.

The layer above the cloth: a population of protruding fibre, and what it owns

Not a thickness but a distribution — its depth belongs to the fibre, its density to the yarn, and one pure number decides whether it is a layer at all — 4 generators.

The loop as a rod: shapes, energy surfaces, forces and what they decide

A knitted loop solved as an elastica rather than drawn — where its bending is, what it presses with, and why the fabric everybody measures is not where the energy would put it — 4 generators.

The climb: a loop out of the fabric's plane, and what a second bed does to it

The one family here that draws a third dimension — the tilt a loop's plane really has, the force that turns out of the fabric with it, and the bed gap that is the whole mechanical difference between a jersey and a rib — 3 generators.

Torque, twist and the topology a thread has to satisfy

The second stiffness nothing here had used, the ratio that survives a bracket of three hundred, and the linking number that separates a knitted fabric from a woven one — 3 generators.

Where the yarn touches, and where this collection's fabric does not fit

Two adjacent courses that occupy the same space at rest, the flattening that falls out of it, and a knot as contact and nothing else — 2 generators.

All essays · The fields