Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Generator

4 ends to a dent

4 ends to a dent
4 ends to a dentA warp as the reed leaves it. The wires stand at 2 mm, 4 ends go through each gap, and inside a gap nothing separates them — so they sit 0.25 mm apart and the 1.00 mm they save collects against the wires. The average spacing is exactly 0.500 mm, which is what the reed was chosen for, and no end is at that spacing from its neighbour.spacings run from 0.25 to 1.25 mm about an average of 0.502.50 times the average at the widest — sett 20.0 per cmevenly spaced, for comparison6 dents at 2 mmgap 1.00 mm24 ends drawnpositions from the reed pitch and the yarn diameter4/dent

A warp as the reed leaves it. The wires stand at 2 mm, 4 ends go through each gap, and inside a gap nothing separates them — so they sit 0.25 mm apart and the 1.00 mm they save collects against the wires. The average spacing is exactly 0.500 mm, which is what the reed was chosen for, and no end is at that spacing from its neighbour.

3 essays call denting. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the weave its essay argues about.

Where it is called

Changing this generator changes every one of these figures.

Which dentings leave a mark. Every combination of ends per dent and weave repeat, with how many ends the grouping takes to come back into step. A small number means the reed treats every repeat the same way and the grouping shows as a stripe at the dent pitch; a large one means the grouping walks across the weave and there is nothing periodic for the eye to find. The rule is one word: dent so the two share no factor. Pattern and colour

The reed leaves its own mark

A reed does not space a warp evenly. It groups it, several ends to a dent, and the grouping beats against the weave repeat — so a denting that shares a factor with the repeat treats every repeat identically and shows as a stripe, and one that does not is invisible.

 A colour order against a 2/2 twill. The visible face of a 2/2 twill under 2 colour orders, drawn at the repeat the divisor arithmetic allows and outlined at the repeat the surface has. A filled cell is a dark thread on the face, which is the warp's colour where the warp is up and the weft's where it is not — so none of these patterns is in the draft, and the draft is the same in all of them. The colour period and the weave repeat beat exactly as a reed's grouping beats against a weave: the surface repeats on the least common multiple of the two, which here is 8×8 and 4×4. What the panels cannot show is colour: the two threads are drawn as filled and empty, and two colours of similar value make a pattern far weaker than this. Pattern and colour

A colour order beats the weave it is threaded on

The reed's grouping beats against the weave repeat and the arithmetic is a least common multiple. A colour order is a second grouping of the same warp and the arithmetic is identical — but where the reed's beat is a fault to be dented out of a cloth, the colour order's beat is the pattern the cloth is sold for. Across 472 colour orders on four weaves the divisor bound is the surface's exact repeat in 470 or more, and the handful that beat it have no pattern left at all.

 A repeat across a 1800-end warp. Four repeat widths laid across the same 1800-end warp, drawn at the warp's own scale. The pale bands at the two ends are the selvedge threading, 24 ends each, which weaves its own firmer weave and is not part of the design. Between them the body is ruled into whole repeats, alternating so they can be counted, and the marked bands at the two sides are the remainder — the part of a repeat that did not fit, split between the two selvedges because the trade centres the pattern. None of these four repeats divides the body exactly, and the leftovers run from 2 to 24 ends. What the drawing cannot show is what the break looks like: a quarter of a repeat at the selvedge reads as a border and half of one reads as a mistake, and where the line between those falls is a judgement. What cloth is

A repeat has to fit the width

A repeat tiles the plane and a warp has two edges, so somewhere between them a repeat is cut through. The set of repeat widths that divide a warp exactly is the set of divisors of its body, and a body of a few thousand ends has a few dozen — two to eight per cent of the candidates. So a designer choosing a repeat for any reason except the width chooses one that does not fit, and the leftover averages half a repeat, split between the two selvedges.

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