Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Depth

Series

A field says what an essay is about. A series follows one idea essay by essay — from the question that introduces it to the one that assumes all the others.
The force at a crossing. One warp end of a sheeting riding over three picks, with the weave angle Peirce's geometry solves for at that construction: 36.8°. An end held at 0.50 N presses each pick it crosses with 0.599 N, which is twice the tension times the sine of the angle and has no material constant in it. What the drawing cannot show is the relaxed case: a cloth with no tension in it still holds its threads together, and what does the holding then is the yarn's own resistance to being bent, which needs an elastica not available here.

Contact

  1. 1 Every crossing is a force
  2. 2 A thread is held one crossing at a time
  3. 3 A thread is gripped where it turns
  4. 4 How much of a cloth is touching
  5. 5 A thickness gauge reads the draft
  6. +16 more
21 essays · cloth The knitted loop. One thread, bent into a course of loops, each of them drawn through the loop below. Nothing here is straight, which is why a knit extends in every direction while a woven cloth extends only on the bias.

Knit

  1. 1 The loop
  2. 2 Why stockinette curls
  3. 3 Ravel, fray and run
  4. 4 Rib and interlock
  5. 5 Why a knit recovers and a woven does not
  6. +14 more
19 essays · knits Where a loop's bending actually is. Half a stitch — from the crown of a needle loop's head to the bottom of the next sinker loop — with the curvature at every station drawn as a spine standing off the curve, in units of one over the yarn diameter. The centre line is drawn as a line rather than at the yarn's own width here, because the subject of this figure is the curvature and a yarn drawn at true width covers its own spines. The peak is 1.00, at 28% of the way along, and the curvature varies smoothly from one end to the other with no jump anywhere. That smoothness is the whole point: Peirce's construction joins an arc of constant curvature to a straight line of none, so its bending moment steps at the join, and a step in moment is a point force no thread can carry. An elastica has no steps in it, which is why its forces exist at all and his do not.

Elastica

  1. 1 A thread between two crossings is an elastica
  2. 2 A force is what an energy does when a crossing moves
  3. 3 A woven thread has no room to bend
  4. 4 A loop is nine tenths free run
  5. 5 What a loop presses with
  6. +9 more
14 essays · mechanics A leno and the open plain weave it is not. Two warp ends and the picks they hold. On the left the doup end passes under its partner between picks and comes up the other side; on the right it never crosses, which is an open plain weave at the same sett. The layer count under each panel is computed by the same criterion that decides every other draft, and it returns the same verdict for both.

Leno

  1. 1 Leno is not a matrix
  2. 2 What holds a pick in
  3. 3 A leno's hole cannot drift
  4. 4 A leno twists what a weave only crosses
  5. 5 The doup end pays for the crossing
  6. +7 more
12 essays · fancy How open a batiste is, against where the light is. One minus the cover is a cloth's openness to a light directly behind it, and for this batiste it is 40.1 per cent. Move off the normal and a line of sight has to clear the hole at the top of the cloth and the same hole one thickness below, so what it can use falls as t·tan α is taken off each side — reaching nothing at 39.0° across the ends. Averaged over the whole sky with Lambert's cosine weighting, the cloth is 6.42 per cent open — 6.3 times less than the covering rule says, and the whole of the difference is the thickness. One minus the cover is the openness of a cloth with no thickness, and no cloth has none.

Opacity

  1. 1 Opacity is not cover
  2. 2 Two layers are the product on average and nowhere
  3. 3 A cloth is more opaque than it is closed
  4. 4 A sheer hides whichever side is darker
  5. 5 A figured sheer is a negative from one side
  6. +7 more
12 essays · pattern A V-fastened tuft. A cut pile bound into its ground by V fastening, drawn in section. The pile end passes beneath 3 of the 6 ground picks and wraps 1 half-turn around them in all. The integrity criterion says the tuft is attached; how hard it is held is a different question with a different model behind it.

Pile

  1. 1 Pile is a third thread system
  2. 2 How a tuft is held
  3. 3 Corduroy is a cut float
  4. 4 Terry needs two beams
  5. 5 Velvet is cut apart
  6. +7 more
12 essays · fancy What an interlacing costs. Each weave's interlacing count beside the closest it can be set in the same yarn. The two run opposite ways, because a thread that changes face often has to bend often and a bend takes room.

Sett

  1. 1 How close can threads be set
  2. 2 Peirce against the racetrack, measured
  3. 3 The weave decides the sett, and two models disagree about it
  4. 4 A tow is not a yarn
  5. 5 The sett decides how much, not how high
  6. +6 more
11 essays · setting Where the floats are in the 5-end satin. Every longest run of warp on the face, marked. A float is smooth because nothing interrupts it, which is the same reason it snags: there is a length of thread lying on the surface with nothing holding it down.

Float

  1. 1 The float decides
  2. 2 Why satin shines
  3. 3 Floats and abrasion
  4. 4 Does a loose weave tear better
  5. 5 Designing to a float limit
  6. +5 more
10 essays · weaves 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.

Integrity

  1. 1 Does it hang together
  2. 2 Braids and the third thread system
  3. 3 Nonwovens, and what holds them together instead
  4. 4 Backed and stitched constructions
  5. 5 The criterion cannot see friction
  6. +5 more
10 essays · cloth The draft for 8-end satin, as a loom holds it. The 8-end satin written the way a weaver writes it: the threading above, saying which shaft each end hangs on; the lifting plan to the right, saying which shafts rise on each pick; and the cloth below, which is not copied from the weave but produced by running those two against one another and then checked against it.

Jacquard

  1. 1 A jacquard is every end its own shaft
  2. 2 A damask is its own complement
  3. 3 A point tie nearly doubles the float at the turn
  4. 4 A brocade weft floats as far as the next figure
  5. 5 A jacquard harness needs three half-spans of height
  6. +5 more
10 essays · fancy 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

  1. 1 Weaves as plane patterns
  2. 2 Colour and weave
  3. 3 The diagonal is not a thread
  4. 4 The seventeen groups a draft can have
  5. 5 Colour and weave as a two-colour problem
  6. +5 more
10 essays · pattern A cloth does not mind a hole. Strength left after a hole, against the width of the hole, for a woven cloth and for a film of the same width. The cloth's threads carry their own load, so it loses exactly the threads the hole removes and the loss is linear. The film is a continuum, so a hole of any size at all costs it the stress concentration factor — quoted from Kirsch's elasticity solution, not derived here — and the size of the hole does not enter.

Damage

  1. 1 A cloth does not mind a hole
  2. 2 A tear stops where the grip is
  3. 3 A knee is a dome imposed a thousand times
  4. 4 A tear asks fewer threads than a pull
  5. 5 A cloth loses its strength before its mass
  6. +4 more
9 essays · applied What four notations can say. Four ways of writing a weave down, with how many of the 426 four-by-four cloths each can express and whether expressing one identifies it: point paper, 426, identifies; a four-part draft on 3 shafts and 4 treadles, 110, identifies; a fraction name, 5, does not identify; a longest-float specification, 426, does not identify. A longest-float specification names every cloth and separates them into only 3 classes.

Notation

  1. 1 Four ways to write a weave down
  2. 2 A profile draft is a notation whose alphabet is weaves
  3. 3 A lifting plan says nothing without a threading
  4. 4 A specification can name a cloth that is not there
  5. 5 The shortest notation has the longest mistakes
  6. +4 more
9 essays · cloth A spread shading on 8 ends. The 7 tone steps of a spread shading on an 8-end repeat, each built by adding one more coset of the 8-end satin with move 3. Every coset has exactly one mark in every end and every pick, so the fraction of warp on the face is k over 8 exactly at every step, with no averaging in it. The numbers beneath are the longest float, and they run 7, 3, 3, 1, 3, 3, 7 — so the lustre scale is not the tone scale. The midtone is a plain weave and the extremes are satins, which is why a spread shading is at its most matt exactly in the middle. What the drafts cannot show is the surface: a long float stands proud of a short one, so an evenly toned shading is not an even surface either.

Shading

  1. 1 A shading changes two things at once
  2. 2 A tone ramp is a valley, and the satin digs it
  3. 3 A tone step does not need a satin
  4. 4 A weave is a halftone screen with n greys
  5. 5 A damask's edge floats further than its figure
  6. +4 more
9 essays · pattern A round thread reflects a beam into a fan. A round thread seen end-on, with a beam arriving from straight above. Every point across the thread has its own normal, tilted by the angle it sits at, and mirrors the beam through twice that angle — so a single direction in becomes a whole fan out, spread across the thread and not at all along it. Seen from the front that fan is a highlight lying along the thread, exactly as long as the length of thread that is straight, which is the float. Nothing about this depends on the fibre. A cylinder of any material returns a fan, and the only way to narrow it is to stop the section being a cylinder — which is what a calender does.

Shine

  1. 1 A float reflects into a line
  2. 2 Lustre is a length times a width
  3. 3 A calender buys the width
  4. 4 Turn the cloth and the shine changes hands
  5. 5 A hair layer veils a highlight
  6. +4 more
9 essays · weaves A stripe of a satin stripe on a plain ground. a satin stripe on a plain ground, written as one draft of 8 picks and 20 ends. Each band is generated from its own rule and the whole matrix is measured as one: 10 shafts, which is the number of distinct columns in the union of the two bands, against 8 if every column were shared and 10 if none were. The bands have 0 columns in common.

Stripe

  1. 1 A stripe is a partition of the warp
  2. 2 A check is two stripes and a tartan is one
  3. 3 A shadow stripe is two twists
  4. 4 A weft stripe is counted in pairs of picks
  5. 5 No weave draws an unbroken line one thread wide
  6. +4 more
9 essays · pattern 8-end satin figured on 8-end sateen. A 3 by 3 block profile, drawn above at one square per block, and the cloth it produces below at one square per intersection. The figure weave is 8-end satin and the ground is 8-end sateen, both single cloths on their own; each block is 8 ends and 8 picks. The composite is 1 cloth, with a longest float of 8 and 0 threads lying loose, all counted from the matrix that drew the picture.

Blocks

  1. 1 A figure is not a stripe
  2. 2 What a figure costs the loom
  3. 3 A woven outline is a staircase
  4. 4 A rectangular block is not half a rule
  5. 5 What else the relative origin decides
  6. +3 more
8 essays · pattern A crossing before and after it is pressed. One warp end of a sheeting riding over three picks, drawn twice to the same scale. Unpressed, both sections are circles and the cloth is 0.388 mm thick. At 0.40 N per crossing the sections flatten to aspect ratios of 1.75 and 1.84, the cloth thins to 0.263 mm, and the warp runs flat for 0.109 mm over each pick before it begins to curve. What the drawing cannot show is why the cloth does not do this by itself: flattening shrinks the arc radius as well as the crimp height, so it costs bending energy, and a relaxed cloth keeps its threads round.

Compression

  1. 1 A flattened thread is a record of a force
  2. 2 The stiffness with no lower bound
  3. 3 The relaxed cloth's contact force
  4. 4 The swelling a cloth cannot take
  5. 5 A thickness is a maximum, not a mean
  6. +3 more
8 essays · mechanics Pull it lengthways and it narrows. The same cloth before and after a small extension along the warp. No thread has stretched: the extension came out of the warp crimp, that crimp went into the weft, and the fabric is narrower for it.

Crimp

  1. 1 Crimp, and why cloth narrows when it is pulled
  2. 2 What crimp interchange actually conserves
  3. 3 A membrane is cut smaller than it is
  4. 4 The crimp ratio is not a measurement
  5. 5 The cloth that was called impossible
  6. +3 more
8 essays · setting A tube. A two-layer fabric 6 ends wide in each layer, with the weft's path drawn across the section below the draft. 1 piece of cloth, 0 free selvedges, 1 shuttle, and a developed width of 12 ends however the edges are joined. The connectivity of the infinite repeat is 2 for this draft and cannot tell this construction from the others.

Double cloth

  1. 1 A tube and two cloths are the same draft
  2. 2 Where a stitch can hide
  3. 3 An interchange joins what a stitch would have had to
  4. 4 Two layers need two beams
  5. 5 The repeat allows four layers and the loom allows two
  6. +3 more
8 essays · fancy

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