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.
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. +2 more
7 essays · pattern 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
  6. +2 more
7 essays · setting 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
  6. +2 more
7 essays · weaves 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
  6. +2 more
7 essays · applied 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. +2 more
7 essays · pattern 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
  6. +2 more
7 essays · finishing 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
  6. +1 more
6 essays · setting 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. +1 more
6 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. +1 more
6 essays · fancy 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
  6. +1 more
6 essays · finishing The draft for 2/2 twill, as a loom holds it. The 2/2 twill 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.

Shafts

  1. 1 How many shafts a draft needs
  2. 2 The harness does not grow
  3. 3 What a dobby stores
  4. 4 Where the heddles go
  5. 5 The harness has a depth
  6. +1 more
6 essays · weaves 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.

Texture weaves

  1. 1 A honeycomb gets its cells in the wash
  2. 2 A crepe cannot be structureless
  3. 3 A hole with nothing crossing
  4. 4 A seersucker is made at the loom
  5. 5 The other crepe is in the yarn
  6. +1 more
6 essays · weaves Linked: a knitted interlacing: one loop drawn through the next. Two closed curves and the Gauss linking integral taken over them, which returns -1.0002 at 200 segments a curve. A knitted interlacing: one loop drawn through the next. A linking number is an integer, so a value coming back at a few thousandths of one is the discretisation reporting itself rather than a fabric that is slightly linked. The two arrangements are the two ways of making cloth: a knitted fabric's courses link and a woven cloth's threads do not, at any crimp and for ever.

Topology

  1. 1 What a closed thread cannot choose
  2. 2 A woven cloth is not linked at all
  3. 2 A jersey's course has no writhe
  4. 3 A point cannot link
  5. 4 Why a knit runs and a weave frays
  6. +1 more
6 essays · mechanics A muslin's warp, drawn at the diameters it actually has. 18 ends of a muslin's warp yarn, drawn at a seeded sample of their own diameters — mean 167 µm, coefficient of variation 15% — and spaced exactly, because the reed does not vary. The threads look even enough. The gaps do not: the widest here is 280 µm and the narrowest 229 µm, against a mean of 250 µm, and their coefficient of variation is 7% — larger than the yarn's, by the ratio of the diameter to the gap. That amplification is the whole reason a close cloth's holes are so much less uniform than its threads, and it gets worse as the cloth is set closer, because the gap in the denominator is the thing being shrunk.

Variation

  1. 1 A cloth is a population, not a thread
  2. 2 A random error hides and a periodic one shows
  3. 3 The spread was never free
  4. 4 A cloth cannot be more even than its yarn
  5. 5 Why a knit shows a thick place
  6. +1 more
6 essays · cloth The two calculations a yarn's stiffness admits. A bundle of 9 fibres bent with the fibres free to slide and with them locked together. Free, the rigidity is the sum of the fibres': 0.00141 N·mm² for a 30 tex cotton yarn. Locked, it is the fourth power of the yarn's own diameter: 0.689. The ratio is the fibre count over the square of the packing factor, 490, and nine fibres are drawn where the yarn has 176. What the drawing cannot show is where a real yarn sits between them, which is a question about friction rather than about fibre.

Yarn stiffness

  1. 1 A yarn's stiffness is a bracket, not a number
  2. 2 What the shed costs, in newtons
  3. 3 Water tells two fibres apart
  4. 4 Recovery is measured and nothing predicts it
  5. 5 Twist decides where in the bracket
  6. +1 more
6 essays · mechanics 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
5 essays · weaves A knit's dimensions come from its loop length. Courses and wales per centimetre against loop length, for a plain weft-knitted fabric in one relaxation state. Neither axis carries a yarn count, a fibre or a machine gauge, and that is the finding: every plain knit measured sits on these two curves whatever it is made of.

Knit geometry

  1. 1 A knit's dimensions come from its loop
  2. 2 The constants do not compose
  3. 3 A knit has no hole to lose
  4. 4 Two knits with one tightness factor are one knit
  5. 5 The constants say nothing about thickness
5 essays · finishing 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
5 essays · cloth Plain weave, doubled. Plain weave, then the same weave with its picks grouped in 2, its ends grouped in 2, and both — which are a warp rib, a weft rib and a hopsack — and a 2/2 twill beside them for comparison. The rules under the drafts bracket the threads that lift together on every pick and so lie touching. Each doubling multiplies the cloth's own unit by 2: 2, then 4, then 8 intersections. The hopsack and the twill interlace equally often and are drawn from different rules. The setts under each draft are the densest that weave may be set at with a 0.25 mm yarn, and a rib's two are 0.750 apart where every other weave here is square.

Rib weaves

  1. 1 A cord is a stripe with no colour in it
  2. 2 A group is one thread for cover and two for bending
  3. 3 A cord's height has a ceiling and its width has none
  4. 4 The four named weaves are corners of a family
  5. 5 What nothing separates comes out together
5 essays · weaves 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
5 essays · weaves

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