Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Depth

Series — page 3

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 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 The surface of a 2/2 twill, in plan. One repeat of a 2/2 twill in sheeting, drawn 2 × 2 times, with every point painted in the colour of whichever thread owns the outside of the cloth there and at an opacity set by how high it is. The range is 221.0 µm from the highest point to the lowest, the root-mean-square roughness is 74.9 µm, and 30% of the plan is hole rather than surface. The bright ribbons are the float plateaux, where a thread lies straight across the threads it passes over and its outside is a horizontal line rather than a point — which is the whole of what follows. The warp crowns at 190.8 µm and the weft at 182.8 µm, a step of 8.0 µm, so the cloth touches the world on its warp alone until anything pressing on it has sunk that far.

Surface

  1. 1 A cloth has an outside
  2. 2 The curve that says what a cloth touches with
  3. 3 Two drafts of twenty-two thousand
  4. 4 The census counted two systems and a surface has one
  5. 5 Four drafts in five have no path along their own crowns
  6. +1 more
6 essays · cloth 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 tricot lapping. A warp-knit lapping drawn from the guide bar's movement. Each thread is coloured by the group of wales it belongs to, so a lapping that leaves the wales independent shows as several colours. This one joins them into 1 group.

Warp knit

  1. 1 Warp knitting, which is a different thing entirely
  2. 2 What a second guide bar is for
  3. 3 Two bars cannot share a beam
  4. 4 The shog is the anisotropy
  5. 5 A patterned warp knit needs a stroke as long as its stripe
  6. +1 more
6 essays · knits 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 Six ways of saying how fine a yarn is. The same four yarns written in six count systems, all placed on one axis of tex. A direct system states mass per unit length and rises as the yarn coarsens; an indirect one states length per unit mass and falls. Both kinds are in daily use and neither says which it is.

Count

  1. 1 The yarn count systems, and why there are several
  2. 2 The count that decides how flat
  3. 3 Two thirds is where a fold weighs its singles
  4. 4 A cable weighs its singles at the twists the finished thread keeps
  5. 5 The singles pay once and every level adds a helix
5 essays · setting 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 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 Every cloth at 150 grams. The counts and setts that all weigh 150 g/m² at a crimp of 7 per cent and a balance of 1. Hollow marks are past the jam — arithmetic rather than cloth. Among the 10 that can be woven the cover factor runs from 0.28 to 0.77, a factor of 2.77, and every one of them is the fabric the specification asked for.

Weight

  1. 1 What a fabric weighs
  2. 2 How dense a knitted fabric is
  3. 3 A weight fixes the fibre and not the drape
  4. 4 A knit's weight nearly names its yarn
  5. 5 A jersey's drape does not know its loop
5 essays · setting The plain. The plain on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it.

What cloth is

  1. 1 A fabric is a structure, not a material
  2. 2 The draft is a matrix
  3. 3 Every cloth there is, at four by four
  4. 4 What the matrix cannot say
  5. 5 The third index is not a repeat
5 essays · cloth 20 tex, counted. The cross-section of a 20 tex cotton yarn, with every fibre in it drawn. The count is a division and nothing else: a 20 tex yarn spun from 0.17 tex fibre has 117.6 fibres crossing any plane through it, and the yarn is 14.0 fibre diameters across because n fibres packed at 0.6 fill a circle √(n/φ) times as wide. The arrangement is drawn on a lattice and is not claimed: real fibres are not on one, they migrate between the core and the surface as they run, and everything this collection says about a yarn's strength turns on their doing so.

Assembly

  1. 1 How many fibres make a thread
  2. 2 A finer yarn is a worse yarn
  3. 3 A yarn breaks at its thinnest place
  4. 4 A warp breaks in a tail no tensile test reaches
4 essays · setting A trellis sheared 30°. The net at an angle, with every thread segment exactly the length it started at. The extension along the diagonal is the bias stretch, and it is a change of shape rather than a change of length.

Bias

  1. 1 The bias is a mechanism
  2. 2 The locking angle
  3. 3 Shear locking in a composite preform
  4. 4 The angle a hose wants
4 essays · mechanics A coating over the hole it has to bridge. Four warp ends of 40 tex seen end-on at 20 per centimetre, with a 120 micrometre PVC film over them. The film is supported everywhere it lies on a thread and unsupported over the 252 micrometre clear span between them, which is the same span at every hole in the repeat. The film's thickness is drawn to scale against that span; the bulge is exaggerated. At 20 MPa the film will hold at most 381 bar, which is a bound and not a prediction.

Coating

  1. 1 A coated cloth fails at its holes
  2. 2 Coated is a state
  3. 3 A coating fills the crowns before it bridges the holes
  4. 4 A print is as sharp as the hairs are long
4 essays · applied The tightest fold a 20 tex cotton yarn can be given. A cloth folded as sharply as it can be folded. The two yarn crowns on the inside of the fold cannot pass through one another, so the fold's radius is the yarn's own — 0.084 mm for a 20 tex cotton yarn — and there is no measurement of an iron anywhere in the argument. At that radius a fibre free to slide is strained 7.14%, which is √(packing × fibre tex ÷ yarn tex), and the whole yarn bending as a rod would be strained exactly one hundred per cent. Cotton's measured breaking extension is 6.0% to 10.0%, so the free bound does not survive and the locked one cannot. What the drawing cannot show is the fibres inside the yarn, which is exactly what the argument is about — the picture is the same either way and the strain is fourteen times different.

Crease

  1. 1 A crease is a fold the crimp cannot supply
  2. 2 Which fibres crease, and why there are two answers
  3. 3 A wrinkle cannot settle what a crease settles
  4. 4 A crease cannot cross a seam
4 essays · finishing The same fault in the warp and in the weft. A 50 m piece 1500 mm wide, with a 3-thread fault in each direction. The width is drawn 9.3 times over scale so that the piece is a rectangle rather than a line, and the two faults are drawn as marks rather than at their own widths, which at this scale are a fifth of a pixel. They have the same cause size — 3 threads — and they condemn 0.063 m² and 0.0020 m² respectively, a ratio of 31 to one, because a warp fault runs the length of the piece and a weft fault runs its width. That ratio is the aspect ratio of the piece and nothing else, so it is a property of how cloth is made rather than of what went wrong. It is why a broken end stops the loom and a mispick often does not, and why the two faults are priced by every grading scheme as though they were different kinds of thing.

Faults

  1. 1 A missing end is a fault the length of the piece
  2. 2 A grade charges by the length and a cutter pays by the panel
  3. 3 A fault map is worth most where the grade is worst
  4. 4 The width of a bolt is worth what its faults leave it
4 essays · applied The ratchet a wool fibre is. A fibre with its scales, and the two strokes of one cycle of agitation. The push is the same in both directions; the distance is not, because the scales resist tip-first motion more than root-first. Every cycle therefore nets a displacement in one direction, and no amount of further agitation undoes it.

Felting

  1. 1 The ratchet that makes wool felt
  2. 2 Milling holds the cloth a second time
  3. 3 Shrink-resist is one number
  4. 4 Why felting needs water
4 essays · finishing The 5-end satin. The 5-end satin on point paper, a filled square meaning the warp is on the face. Its longest float, its interlacing count and the number of separable cloths it describes were all counted from the matrix that drew it.

Foundation weaves

  1. 1 Plain, twill and satin
  2. 2 Twill direction, and how it is named
  3. 3 Broken and herringbone twills
  4. 4 How many twills a repeat admits
4 essays · weaves Stick, slip, and the ratio between the two coefficients. The force in a thread as a cloth is agitated, with a static coefficient of 0.300 and a kinetic one of 0.225 — a ratio of 0.75, which is what fibre on fibre measures. The force climbs until it reaches the static limit, the contact breaks away, and while it is sliding it resists only at the kinetic limit. So a cloth that is being shaken can be left anywhere in the narrower band, and a cloth at rest anywhere in the wider one. What the trace cannot show is how much this buys: the band does not narrow in the ratio of the coefficients, because the restoring force stiffens away from the minimum, and the real narrowing is nearer 0.87 than 0.75.

Friction

  1. 1 Two coefficients, not one
  2. 2 Why agitation helps a cloth relax
  3. 3 Friction is two surfaces, not one
  4. 4 What friction has to hold in a relaxed knit
4 essays · cloth

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