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.

1 essay calls seersucker. 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.