Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Depth

Series — page 2

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.
One dip, two yarns: the same depth of dye. The cross-section of two cotton yarns drawn to one scale after a 20-second dip in a bath whose dye the fibres take up 10 times as strongly as the liquor holds it, each fibre shaded by the dye that reached its distance from the surface. 20 tex: 118 fibres, 167.1 µm across, dyed to 19.7 µm — 24% of its radius and 42% of its section; 74 tex: 435 fibres, 321.4 µm across, dyed to 18.2 µm — 11% of its radius and 21% of its section. The depth in micrometres is the same for both because a dip dyes a depth; the share is not, because the coarse yarn has more section behind the same ring. The fibres are drawn on a lattice and the count is computed; the affinity is an assumed value and every depth moves with its square root.

Dyeing

  1. 1 A dip dyes a depth, not a share
  2. 2 A ring-dyed yarn whitens all at once
  3. 3 A float fades late and hard, a crossing early and soft
  4. 4 A crease across a twill fades in dashes
  5. 5 A crease along the twill fades as one line
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8 essays · finishing 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.

Fancy yarn

  1. 1 A chenille is a yarn that is already a fabric
  2. 2 A designed thin place is kinder than an accidental one
  3. 3 A fancy yarn has its crimp in the wrong thread
  4. 4 A bouclé is set by its loops and weighed by its count
  5. 5 A bouclé loop is an elastica, not a semicircle
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8 essays · fancy A beat at 19.1 mm from grids at 0.5 mm. Two grids at 0.5 and 0.5 mm pitch, the second turned by 1.5°, over a 30 mm window. The dashed rules are one predicted beat period apart. The pattern between them is 38 times the pitch of either grid and neither grid has anything at that scale.

Moire

  1. 1 Watered silk is a beat
  2. 2 The reed leaves its own mark
  3. 3 A slub finds the width of the cloth
  4. 4 A colour order beats the weave it is threaded on
  5. 5 A moiré is a vernier, and it magnifies the error too
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8 essays · pattern Which satins exist. For each order, the moves that give a satin — a step coprime with the order, and not the steps of one and one less which give a twill instead. Four and six admit none, so no regular satin exists on four ends or on six.

Satin

  1. 1 There is no satin on six ends
  2. 2 Which satins are worth weaving
  3. 3 The six-end satin that does exist
  4. 4 Most satins still have a diagonal
  5. 5 A float limit leaves one row-free satin
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8 essays · weaves The same thread, on the loom and off it. One warp end in section over eight picks, drawn twice at the same scale. The thread is the same length in both panels; in the lower one more of that length is in the bends, so the cloth it spans is shorter. Nothing has been lost — the length has moved into the crimp. The thread's thickness and the height of its bends are drawn larger than scale so the interlacing is legible; the two panels' spacings are not.

State

  1. 1 What comes off the loom is not the cloth
  2. 2 The cloth gains weight by losing size
  3. 3 A dimension without a state
  4. 4 A cloth relaxes until its threads stop pushing
  5. 5 A state is a thickness too
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8 essays · finishing Everywhere a sheeting can go. Every state a sheeting of 28 × 26 threads per centimetre in 25 and 25 tex can reach without a yarn changing length, solved from Peirce's plain-weave geometry. The set is a curve and not a region: 4.03 per cent of extension is available along the warp, and reaching it costs 6.98 per cent of the width.

Tensile

  1. 1 A cloth extends by moving its crimp
  2. 2 Pulled both ways, only one can give
  3. 3 A cloth's Poisson ratio is not a material's
  4. 4 The locus gets a force
  5. 5 A cloth has one budget for two directions
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8 essays · mechanics Z twist at 800 turns per metre. A 20 tex cotton yarn, 0.167 mm across, with its surface fibres drawn as the helices they are. The angle between a surface fibre and the yarn's axis is 22.8°, and it is the only quantity in this family: the yarn is 4.1% shorter than the fibre in it and carries 85% of the strength the same fibre would give lying straight.

Twist

  1. 1 Twist is one angle
  2. 2 Twist and the twill line
  3. 3 The other half of the twist curve
  4. 4 The spinning triangle decides the hair
  5. 5 Why a slack yarn snarls
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8 essays · setting rib-float in section. A two-bed structure seen in section across the wales, over 3 repeats of course 1. The front bed's loops sit on the upper line and the back bed's on the lower one, offset by 0.5 of a needle pitch because the gating is rib. Of the 2 floats in the repeat, 2 lie in the gap between the beds and 0 on a surface. The upper panel is the fabric at the machine and the lower one is the same course with the beds closed up, which is what happens when the fabric is cast off — and neither panel is a relaxed fabric, because the loops are drawn as arches of one size and a real one settles wherever the yarn's bending leaves it.

Two-bed

  1. 1 A second bed changes what a float is
  2. 2 Does a double jersey hang together
  3. 3 A rib pulls back on a force the loop supplies
  4. 4 A rib climbs a gap
  5. 5 Where a two-bed fabric's yarn is
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8 essays · knits The same yarn, flattened. One yarn's cross-section at five degrees of flattening, all drawn at one scale and all of the same area. Nothing is added: the yarn is wider because it is thinner. The cover rises for that reason alone, which is why a calendered cloth is more opaque than the cloth that went into the machine.

Lustre finish

  1. 1 Calendering is the cloth arriving at the other model
  2. 2 Mercerising is a packing factor
  3. 3 A calender spends the compression for good
  4. 4 A finish spends a spread before it spends a mean
  5. 5 A calender works where nothing has been measured
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7 essays · finishing Folding, and what it takes out of the singles. Two 20 tex singles spun at 800 turns per metre and folded the other way at 540 — a ratio of 0.675, which is the trade's own and is a measurement rather than a derivation. A single held at its ends and wound round its neighbour turns about its own axis once for every turn of the fold, so it is left with 260 turns per metre of its own: its surface fibres lie at 7.8° to its axis rather than the 22.8° they were spun at. Folding untwists. The short strokes are drawn at that residual angle; the two long curves are centre lines and are not the yarn — each strand is itself a bundle of 118 fibres, and the residual angle is what holds them.

Ply

  1. 1 Folding is untwisting
  2. 2 A two-fold yarn is not twice a single
  3. 3 The singles inside a ply are not the singles
  4. 4 The folding rule is not a torque balance
  5. 5 The folding rule is a surface angle
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7 essays · setting 2/2 twill: written at 4×4, repeating on 4. On the left the draft as written, with the smallest rectangle that tiles it outlined. On the right the same draft with every translation that leaves it unchanged marked from the top left corner: there are 4 of them, so a fundamental domain holds 4 intersections rather than the 16 the rectangle claims and the 16 the point paper carries. Nothing in the drawing on the left says so.

Repeat

  1. 1 What a repeat repeats
  2. 2 A repeat has to fit the width
  3. 3 A repeat has to fit the panel, and the panel is cut
  4. 4 Two lots of one cloth drift apart down a drop
  5. 5 A skew steps at every seam and a bow at none
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7 essays · cloth What holds a thread in a seam. A cloth thread inside a seam allowance, drawn past the crossings that grip it, with the capstan's factor at each. The tension falls by that factor at every crossing, so the grip is exponential in the crossing count and the count is what the weave decides. Beyond the thread's own strength the thread breaks rather than slides, and the rest of the allowance holds nothing.

Seams

  1. 1 What holds a thread in a seam
  2. 2 The stitch that weakens the seam
  3. 3 A seam slips before it breaks
  4. 4 How far a cut edge frays
  5. 5 A sewing thread is a different animal
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7 essays · applied A fashioned edge at 1 wales in 2 courses. A knitted panel narrowing by 1 wale every 2 courses, drawn at the fabric's own aspect: a wale is 1.2791 times as wide as a course is tall, which is Munden's ratio of the two published constants. The edge therefore stands at 32.60 degrees from the wale, and that angle is the same in every yarn, at every gauge and at every loop length. Marks show where the 8 transfers fall.

Shaping

  1. 1 A fashioned edge has a quantised angle
  2. 2 A tube can only be shaped by its loop
  3. 3 A heel turns a right angle because of the loop
  4. 4 A knitted disc is flat at one shape of loop
  5. 5 A knitted ball's short rows have to slow down
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7 essays · knits The same thread, on the loom and off it. One warp end in section over eight picks, drawn twice at the same scale. The thread is the same length in both panels; in the lower one more of that length is in the bends, so the cloth it spans is shorter. Nothing has been lost — the length has moved into the crimp. The thread's thickness and the height of its bends are drawn larger than scale so the interlacing is legible; the two panels' spacings are not.

Shrinkage

  1. 1 Relaxation is the crimp coming back
  2. 2 Why the warp shrinks more
  3. 3 A cloth cannot shrink past its own crimp
  4. 4 Pre-shrinking is a subtraction done in advance
  5. 5 Two shrinkages, one tape measure
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7 essays · finishing A cotton fibre dry and wet. One cotton fibre in its dry state and saturated with water, both drawn at the same scale in both directions. It is 20% wider and 1.2% longer, so its cross-sectional area rises by 44% if the section stays similar to itself. The length difference is drawn and is nearly invisible, which is the point: a swelling that were the same in both directions would make a cloth bigger and change nothing about its structure, and this one changes every ratio of a diameter to a spacing in the cloth. What the drawing cannot show is the section: a cotton fibre is not a cylinder, and the directly measured area swelling of 40% to 42% does not agree with the square of the width change, which is a fact about the fibre.

Water

  1. 1 What water does to a thread
  2. 2 A yarn's voids are not enough
  3. 3 The hairs decide the sign of the wetting
  4. 4 A cotton's own water is a twentieth of what a cloth holds
  5. 5 A wet fibre is stiffer and a wet yarn is not locked
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7 essays · cloth Two pore systems in one cloth — 24 threads per centimetre. A plain weave of 20 tex cotton in section, at 24 threads per centimetre, so the yarn is 167 µm across and the clear hole between two picks is 250 µm. That hole's hydraulic radius is 124.8 µm. Inside the yarn, fibres 14 µm across packed at 0.6 leave spaces of hydraulic radius 2.33 µm — 53 times finer, and by Jurin's law 53 times higher: 6.37 m against 119 mm. The yarn's interior is magnified 6 times and the two discs at the foot are the only part drawn at one scale.

Wicking

  1. 1 How high a cloth wicks
  2. 2 Wicking is slower along a crimped thread
  3. 3 The pore that wicks is the pore that leaks
  4. 4 A drying cloth cannot lift what a sealed tube can
  5. 5 A wick reaches its ceiling in the time its cloth takes to dry
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7 essays · applied The same thread count, twice. Two cloths with identical thread counts and different yarn. The count is the same number in both; the fraction of the surface the threads actually occupy is not, and that fraction is what thread count is usually taken to mean.

Cover

  1. 1 Thread count is not quality
  2. 2 Balance, and what an unbalanced cloth does
  3. 3 Where the cover factor comes from
  4. 4 The hole between four threads
  5. 5 One minus the cover is a cloth with no thickness
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6 essays · setting The basic weaves at four by four. Plain weave and the three twills a repeat of four admits, each drawn with its longest float and its layer count computed from the matrix. The fifth frame is empty: a satin needs a move coprime with its order and neither one nor one less than it, and four ends admits 0 such moves. So the smallest interesting repeat contains two of the three weaves every manual begins with.

Derivation

  1. 1 The three basic weaves do not generate the rest
  2. 2 What combining two weaves reaches
  3. 3 A mispick is one row in the wrong place
  4. 4 No cloth derives into more than three others
  5. 5 A cloth's derivation class is its census of small patches
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6 essays · weaves 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.

Firmness

  1. 1 Interlacings and firmness
  2. 2 A cloth slips at its least-interlaced thread
  3. 3 A selvedge holds only where its edge end changes face
  4. 4 A weave holds its selvedge with two of its own columns, or not at all
  5. 5 A tucked-in edge asks every weave the odd repeat's question
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6 essays · weaves What a raising machine can catch in a 2/2 twill. The draft with every weft float long enough for a raising wire to lift marked on it. The teeth need an unsupported length of thread on the surface, so a cloth in which every thread is bound at every crossing offers them nothing at all — which is why a napped fabric is always a twill or a satin and never a plain weave.

Nap

  1. 1 Only a float can be raised
  2. 2 Raising spends the cloth's strength
  3. 3 Raising moves the surface onto the hairs
  4. 4 What holds a nap in a knit
  5. 5 A jersey has no float for a wire to catch
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6 essays · finishing

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