Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Generator

Where a honeycomb gets its cells

Where a honeycomb gets its cells
Where a honeycomb gets its cells. One row across the repeat. Above, how much each region of the cloth wants to contract when it is finished — the interlaced regions want more, the floated ones less, and the cloth can only contract by one amount. Below, the surface that leaves: the floated regions are compressed by the difference and the surplus goes out of the plane. Drawn at true scale against the cloth's own thickness.

One row across the repeat. Above, how much each region of the cloth wants to contract when it is finished — the interlaced regions want more, the floated ones less, and the cloth can only contract by one amount. Below, the surface that leaves: the floated regions are compressed by the difference and the surplus goes out of the plane. Drawn at true scale against the cloth's own thickness.

2 essays call relief. 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.

Float lengths in a honeycomb. The same draft twice. On the left, filled where the warp is on the face — which is all point paper says. On the right, every intersection shaded by the length of the float it belongs to, from one at the palest to 6 at the strongest. The gradient on the right is the whole mechanism of a relief weave and it is invisible on the left. Weaves

A honeycomb gets its cells in the wash

The obvious mechanism is take-up on the loom, and the arithmetic says it is wrong: every end of a diamond passes through the long floats and the tight ones alike. What is left is finishing, and a cell is a region that wanted to shrink less than the cloth around it.

 A seersucker in section. A seersucker in section across four stripes, at a feed ratio of 1.30 — the slack warp let off 30 per cent faster than the tight one — over a 6.0 mm stripe. The surplus has nowhere to go in the plane, so it buckles, and the standard small-amplitude result gives 2.09 mm of rise, which is 4.2 times the cloth's own thickness of 0.500 mm. Nothing has to relax for this to appear: unlike a honeycomb, a seersucker comes off the loom already puckered, and washing deepens it rather than creating it. What the drawing cannot show is that the buckle's shape is an assumption — a sinusoid pinned at the stripe's edges — while its amplitude follows from the surplus and the half-wavelength alone. Weaves

A seersucker is made at the loom

Every other relief weave in this collection gets its shape after the loom, from a difference of crimp between two regions of a few per cent. A seersucker's surplus is thirty per cent and is put in as the cloth is woven — an order of magnitude more, which the square root turns into a factor of four in depth and no more than that.

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