Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Generator

The 2/2 twill

The 2/2 twill
The 2/2 twill. The 2/2 twill on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it.

The 2/2 twill on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it.

14 essays call draft. 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

Every figure listed here is drawn from this one rule.

The 5-end satin. The 5-end satin on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it. Weaves

Plain, twill and satin

Three rules, and everything else in weaving is a variation on them. What separates the three is not appearance but one trade — how often a thread changes face against how far it runs when it does not.

 The plain. The plain on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it. What cloth is

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.

 A draft is a two-coloured pattern. For each weave, the symmetries that leave warp-up as warp-up and those that exchange the two. Only a balanced weave has any of the second kind, because exchanging warp and weft is only a symmetry when there is as much of one on the face as the other. Pattern and colour

Weaves as plane patterns

A draft is a periodic pattern with two states, so its symmetry is two-coloured. Some operations leave warp-up as warp-up and others exchange the two, and only a balanced weave has any of the second kind.

 The 2/2 twill. The 2/2 twill on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it. What cloth is

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.

 Whether the cloth is one cloth. Two drafts. Both interlace everywhere, both have short floats, and both look like perfectly ordinary weaves. One is a single fabric and the other is two fabrics lying on each other, and the bars beside each strand say which layer it belongs to. What cloth is

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.

 One break, two outcomes. The same single break in a knit and in a weave. In the knit nothing holds the loop above the break, so the failure climbs the wale; in the weave every other thread is still held by the threads crossing it, and one thread comes loose. Knits and other structures

Ravel, fray and run

Cut a woven cloth and one thread comes loose. Break one loop in a knit and every loop above it follows. The two structures fail in opposite ways, and the reason is topology rather than strength.

 The 2/2 twill. The 2/2 twill on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it. Pattern and colour

The diagonal is not a thread

A twill's diagonal is the most looked-at feature in weaving and the most misdescribed. No thread in the cloth runs diagonally. What runs diagonally is a pattern of which thread is on top, which is a different sort of object.

 The twelve groups a draft can have. Every four-by-four draft in which each thread interlaces, classified by its plane symmetry group. Twelve of the seventeen groups occur; the five that do not are the ones needing a three-fold rotation, which no grid of warp and weft admits at any size. Pattern and colour

The seventeen groups a draft can have

Twelve of them, in fact. The five missing ones all need a three-fold rotation, and no grid of warp and weft admits one at any size — which makes it a theorem rather than an artefact of the census.

 The 5-end satin. The 5-end satin on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it. What cloth is

What the matrix cannot say

A weave is a binary matrix, and the whole of this collection rests on it. So it is worth setting down, in one place and precisely, what that encoding decides exactly, what it decides while appearing to decide something else, and the four quite different reasons a real fabric can fall outside it altogether.

 How many twills there are. Every way of writing a twill on each repeat, reduced by the two operations that leave the cloth unchanged: starting on a different pick, and turning it over. What is left is the number a designer actually chooses between. Weaves

How many twills a repeat admits

Sixty-four ways of writing a twill on eight ends, and twenty-one twills. The difference is two operations that leave the cloth unchanged, and a catalogue that does not quotient by them is counting notations rather than fabrics.

 The selvedge turns of a 2/2 twill, 4 ends wide, from the left. A strip of 2/2 twill 4 ends wide over 8 picks, the first thrown from the left, with the weft's turn between every pair of picks drawn at the edge it reaches. 0 of the 8 turns are caught, where the edge end is on the other face on the second pick, and 8 slip. Across all its edge placements the weave catches every turn at 8 of 16. What the drawing cannot show is how far a slipped loop travels, which the beat-up and the weft tension decide. Weaves

A selvedge holds only where its edge end changes face

A shuttle weft goes out on one pick and back on the next, and between them it turns round the end at the edge. The turn is caught only if that end is on the other face on the second pick; otherwise the loop has nothing to wrap and slides off. Plain weave catches every turn at every width. A 2/2 twill catches them at half its widths, and only if the first pick is thrown from the right side. A 3/1 twill, a hopsack and every satin catch them nowhere, and of the 22,874 four-by-four drafts, 9,636 cannot hold a selvedge at any width at all.

 The selvedge turns of a 2/2 basket, 8 ends wide, from the left. A strip of 2/2 basket 8 ends wide over 8 picks, the first thrown from the left, with the weft's turn between every pair of picks drawn at the edge it reaches. 4 of the 8 turns are caught, where the edge end is on the other face on the second pick, and 4 slip. Across all its edge placements the weave catches every turn at 0 of 16. What the drawing cannot show is how far a slipped loop travels, which the beat-up and the weft tension decide. Weaves

A weave holds its selvedge with two of its own columns, or not at all

A selvedge holds where its edge end changes face at every turn of the weft there, and the turns at one edge fall on alternate pick boundaries. So an end can hold the right edge only if its column changes face at every odd boundary, and the left edge only at every even one. Whether a weave can hold a selvedge is then whether its set of columns contains one of each kind, and nothing about its width matters. Two ends re-entered on the right shafts make 13,238 of the 22,874 four-by-four drafts hold at any width, where 3,262 did. The other 9,636 need a shaft of their own. A weave with an odd number of picks has no column of either kind, and never can.

 The tucked-in edges of a 2/2 twill, 8 ends wide. A strip of 2/2 twill 8 ends wide over 8 picks, woven with tucked-in edges: every pick is cut at both edges and each tail is laid back into the next shed, so between every pair of picks there is a turn at both edges. 8 of the 16 tucked turns are caught, where the edge end is on the other face in the next shed, and 8 are not. Across all its edge placements the weave catches every tucked turn at 0 of 16. What the drawing cannot show is the tail itself, which lies alongside the next pick for the tuck's length and doubles the weft there. Weaves

A tucked-in edge asks every weave the odd repeat's question

A shuttle weft turns at one edge per pick, alternately, and that alternation is what let a 2/2 twill hold both selvedges with two ends re-entered on its own shafts. A rapier or air-jet loom cuts every pick at both edges and tucks both tails into the next shed, so every boundary between picks is a turn at both edges — the question an odd repeat always asked. Only a plain column answers it. Of the 22,874 four-by-four drafts, 10,382 can still hold their edges on their own shafts, against 13,238 under a shuttle; the 2/2 twill is among the 2,856 lost. And the tucked zone carries two picks in every shed, which lies flat only below between a half and two thirds of a weave's maximum pick density.

 One warp feed, in the body and in a tucked zone of plain weave. A section along one warp end of 20 tex cotton, in plain weave woven at 70 per cent of its maximum pick density, in the body of the cloth and in the tucked zone with two picks to a shed. Both ends are fed the same length per pick, so the zone's end rises only 0.124 mm against the body's 0.161 mm, and the weft takes up the difference. The cloth is 0.341 mm thick in the body and 0.377 mm in the zone, 11 per cent thicker. The climb between crossings is drawn smooth rather than as the model's arcs and tangent. Weaves

A tucked edge stands proud because its warp goes straight

A tucked zone holds two picks in every shed, and the obvious account is that the pairs run out of room and bulge. The loom says otherwise: the warp is let off as one sheet and the cloth taken up at one speed, so the zone's ends have only the body's length to spend. They rise less. The weft takes up the height, so the edge is proud well before the pairs stop fitting, and they stand up well after the count says they must.

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