Textile Structure
how cloth is put together
Series

What cloth is — the series

5 essays on one idea, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.
  1. 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.

    A fabric is a structure, not a material

    Cotton is a material. Cloth is an arrangement, and almost everything a fabric does follows from how the threads are put together rather than from what they are made of.

    part 1 · cloth
  2. The 2/2 twill. The 2/2 twill 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.

    The draft is a matrix

    Point paper is not a diagram of cloth. It is a grid of yes-or-no decisions about which threads to lift, which makes a weave a binary matrix and almost every question about it arithmetic.

    part 2 · cloth
  3. How often a draft falls apart. Every four-by-four draft in which each end and each pick interlaces at least once, sorted by its longest float, with the fraction that describe more than one cloth. The counts are produced by running the enumeration rather than by recalling it.

    Every cloth there is, at four by four

    Sixty-five thousand matrices, twenty-two thousand weaves, and about a dozen with names. The complete census of the smallest interesting repeat is a map of a whole small world, and almost none of it has ever been woven.

    part 3 · cloth
  4. 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.

    What the matrix cannot say

    A weave is a binary matrix, and the whole of this collection rests on it. So it is worth setting down, in one place and precisely, what that encoding decides exactly, what it decides while appearing to decide something else, and the four quite different reasons a real fabric can fall outside it altogether.

    part 4 · cloth
  5. A preform through its thickness, and whether it is one piece. An orthogonal three-dimensional preform in section, with the binder's path, beside the digraph the integrity criterion consumes: one node per level, an arrow from each level to the one above it, and the binder's own contacts. The warp and weft here are straight and do not interlace at all, so the whole of the connectivity is the binder — and the count of separable pieces is what the criterion returns, unchanged from the weave it was written for.

    The third index is not a repeat

    The fancy weaves left three-dimensional weaving open as a possible fifth escape from the binary matrix. It is not one. The criterion that decides whether a plain weave is one cloth decides a five-layer preform unchanged — and what a third dimension actually takes away is periodicity, because a thickness has a top and a bottom and a repeat does not.

    part 5 · applied

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