Everything a plain knit can be, at one loop length
Bending energy over the two spacings a plain knit has to choose, for a 20 tex cotton yarn at a 3.5 mm loop, as a multiple of the energy the fully relaxed fabric holds. Darker is more. The solid edge is where the straight line between two interlacings reaches the yarn between them — the geometry's own limit, with nothing elastic in it — and there is no state beyond it at any force. Munden's three relaxation states are marked, and the thing to see is that they are not in a hollow: they lie along a slope, in order, with the most completely relaxed of them the highest. An unset yarn would slide down and to the right until it met the edge. Real fabrics sit where they were left.
2 essays call
loop-field. 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.
The relaxed knit is not at a minimum
Differentiate a loop's bending energy along the fabric instead of across it and the answer should be zero, because a relaxed fabric is one nothing is pulling. It is not zero. It is tens of newtons a metre, downhill in both directions at once — and the three relaxation states everybody measures run the wrong way up the slope.
How far a knit could go if its yarn were the limit
The yarn in a stitch allows three hundred and twenty per cent course-wise extension before the straight line between two interlacings reaches the thread spanning it. A jersey jams at about a hundred. The factor of three is the finding: what stops a knit stretching is not the loop running out of yarn.