Textile Structure
how cloth is put together

A weave is a matrix.

Warp up or warp down at every intersection, over a repeat that tiles the cloth. That is not a convenient way of writing a weave down — it is the weave, and it means almost every question about a fabric has an exact answer: how long the floats are, how close the threads can be set, and whether the thing holds together at all. The same is true one structure over, where a knitted loop is a curve that can be solved and a yarn is a rod with two stiffnesses and a topology — which is why a knit runs where a weave frays. These are essays about cloth as a structure, from the draft down to the thread, with the arithmetic done rather than asserted.

The weaves everything else is built from. Plain, twill and satin on point paper. Reading across, the floats lengthen and the interlacings fall — and every property a weaver cares about follows from that one trade.
Fig. 1 The three weaves everything else is built from, drawn on the point paper a weaver would use — a filled square means the warp is on the face. None of these was drawn by hand. Each was generated from its own rule and then examined: the floats counted, the interlacings counted, and the cloth itself checked for the failure that a draft cannot show, which is whether the threads are tied into one fabric or several.

Added 20 September 2026

13 essays · everything that arrived when, newest first

Which specifications a 30 tex yarn can be woven into. Warp sett across against weft sett down, in threads a centimetre, for a 30 tex cotton yarn. Each cell is one specification. 220 are left empty because no cloth in the catalogue can be woven at those two setts; 16 are filled and outlined in the warp's colour because every one of the 426 can; and 20 are filled and outlined in the float's colour because some can and some cannot. The admissible region is a rectangle because the warp sett and the weft sett are bounded by two different counts. What cloth is

A specification can name a cloth that is not there

The three notations measured so far write drafts, and every draft is a cloth somebody could weave. A mill works from none of them: it works from a count, two setts and a weave quoted together, and that is the first notation whose image has holes in it. Of 2,560 specifications across the trade's own working range, 2,097 name no cloth at all — and in the 240 where the weave field decides anything, both numbers the trade quotes to decide it rank the catalogue wrongly.

7 figures Where a calender works, and where recovery has been measured. Each fibre's measured elastic-recovery span drawn against the shape strains a calender imposes, on one axis. The settings run from 11.2 per cent shape strain at a flattening of 1.25 to 54.9 per cent at 3. cotton is measured to 5 per cent; wool is measured to 20 per cent; silk is measured to 5 per cent; flax is measured to 2 per cent; viscose is measured to 5 per cent; nylon is measured to 8 per cent; polyester is measured to 8 per cent. Only wool reaches any setting at all, and only the lightest. After the loom

A calender works where nothing has been measured

This account has twice recorded that the missing piece is plasticity — what fraction of a flattening survives the nip. The piece is missing for a sharper reason than nobody having written it down. A calender's flattening is a shape strain, and at the lightest setting in this account's own series that is 11 per cent while cotton's elastic recovery is measured from 2 to 5. Six fibres of seven have no data at any setting the machine has, and wool reaches only the lightest. The law cannot be had from the measurements; what can be had is the bracket, and it is a factor of twenty-four.

6 figures What each further binder takes off a snag. How far a snag drags thread through a bouclé, in binder points, against how many binders the yarn carries: 1, 7.43 points; 2, 3.72 points; 3, 2.48 points; 4, 1.86 points; 6, 1.24 points. The relation is exactly inverse, because the grip is the exponential of the wrap angle and the reach is a logarithm of it, so the second binder removes 3.72 binder points and the third a further 1.24. Compound and figured cloths

The second binder buys half of everything

A bouclé's loops are held by their binder, and a snag drags thread from one loop to the next until the thread breaks. The essay before it left that reach at seven binder points on one binder and said a second would square the grip. It does — and because the grip is exponential in the wrap and the reach is a logarithm of it, the reach is exactly inverse in the binder count: 7.43 points, then 3.72, then 2.48. Half of everything any number of binders can buy is bought by the second one, which is how many the trade uses.

6 figures What one wrong symbol reaches. Five kinds of symbol, with how many of them a document holds and how many intersections of a 1800-by-1800 piece one of them decides. A threading digit reaches 810,000; a jacquard card's hole reaches one. The product of the two columns is 3,240,000 in every row, because each set of symbols decides every intersection of the piece exactly once. What cloth is

The shortest notation has the longest mistakes

Four essays of this account have asked what each notation can express. None has asked what happens when one is written down wrong, and the answer is an identity rather than a tendency: a notation's symbols partition the cloth, so the count of symbols times the reach of one is the piece, in every notation, with nothing to trade. One threading digit decides 810,000 intersections of a square metre and one of a jacquard's holes decides one — and only the threading can be wrong while the cloth is right.

7 figures How much plateau a cloth of stated cover can be given. The flat run a calender can put on a 200 micrometre yarn, against the cover the cloth already has. A thread may widen until it meets its neighbours, so the flattening is capped where the section's width equals the pitch; at a cover of 0.3 that is a flattening of 13.9 and 619 micrometres of plateau, and at 0.9 it is 1.32 and 53 micrometres. At full cover both are nothing. After the loom

A covered cloth cannot be calendered

A calender widens a section at conserved area, and a thread may widen until it meets its neighbours. So the flattening is capped by the cover the cloth already has — ×30 on a scrim, ×1.32 at a cover of nine tenths, and exactly one at full cover. The plateau a calender buys falls to nothing along with it, which makes the lustre a nip can add and the cloth's opacity the same constraint read twice: a cloth that cannot be seen through is a cloth a calender cannot help.

5 figures What a pair of colour orders does to the catalogue. Dark ends in the warp across against dark ends in the weft down, for the sixteen two-colour orders at four ends. Each cell gives the blind intersections of sixteen and the number of distinct surfaces the 22874 drafts collapse onto. Every cell stands for between one and thirty-six colour orders and they all behave identically, so the arrangement of the colours does not matter and only their counts do. The corner at four against nought is blind nowhere and separates every draft. Pattern and colour

The colour order that hides least

A caption on this account's top essay left a question: whether a warp of long runs against a weft of short ones hides less than either would against itself, and called it a lever nobody uses. Sweeping all sixteen orders against all sixteen says the lever is real and the caption named the wrong variable. Run length has nothing to do with it — the blind count, the separation and the largest confused class all depend on the two orders' colour counts and on nothing else, and what a mixed pair saves is exactly the square of the difference between them.

5 figures

The other 7 in the same group

Four ways in

besides the list

Series

A field says what an essay is about. A series says what else there is to say about one idea — the distinct arguments against it, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.

82 ideas

The weave index

Every draft in the essays, measured the same way — float, interlacing, layers, plane group, warp face, densest sett. Not one number in it was typed in, and two of the rows are not one cloth.

24 drafts

Refutations

Every commonplace claim about cloth that has been put to a number, with the verdict and the quantity that settles it — computed rather than quoted.

89 claims tested

Concepts

The named objects themselves — float, crimp, jamming, the wale — and every essay that touches each one. The third axis, after fields and series.

544 objects

The nine fields

what the site covers, in the order the argument builds it

What cloth is Weaves Setting and geometry Knits and other structures Mechanics and drape Pattern and colour Compound and figured cloths After the loom Cloth doing a job All nine

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463 essays · all of them, paginated

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. Weaves

Plain, twill and satin

Three rules, and everything else in weaving is a variation on them. What separates the three is not appearance but one trade — how often a thread changes face against how far it runs when it does not.

6 figures 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. Mechanics and drape

The bias is a mechanism

Cloth cut at forty-five degrees stretches by a third and springs back, while the threads in it stretch by nothing at all. Almost every explanation given for this is wrong, and the right one is not about elasticity.

7 figures How much fibre a woven reinforcement holds. A unit cell of a woven reinforcement in section: flat tows, the thickness they add up to, and the wave the warp makes to cross them. The bar below is the fibre volume fraction against the same tows laid flat in two plies and against the packing factor of a tow, which is the most any cloth of them could be. The vertical scale is exaggerated so the interlacing is legible; the horizontal scale is the cloth's own. Cloth doing a job

The crimp is the price of being cloth

A woven reinforcement is bought for stiffness along its fibres, and the usual explanation of what it gives up — fibre content, lost to the crimp — has the sign wrong. At a given thickness a woven fabric holds slightly more fibre than two flat plies of the same tows. What the crimp costs is stiffness, and the float length is the knob.

7 figures 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. Knits and other structures

The loop

A knit is one thread bent into loops, each drawn through the loop below. Nothing in it is straight, which is why it stretches in every direction while a woven cloth stretches only at an angle.

6 figures 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. Setting and geometry

Thread count is not quality

It counts threads. It says nothing about how much of the cloth they cover, it can be inflated by counting plies, and it ranks fabrics in nearly the wrong order. The quantity it is mistaken for is cover factor, and that one is computable.

6 figures 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 and colour

Weaves as plane patterns

A draft is a periodic pattern with two states, so its symmetry is two-coloured. Some operations leave warp-up as warp-up and others exchange the two, and only a balanced weave has any of the second kind.

7 figures 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

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.

6 figures 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. After the loom

What comes off the loom is not the cloth

Every number on this site so far describes a fabric in one particular condition — held under tension, stretched to the reed width, never wetted — and none of them says so. That condition lasts until the cloth is taken off the machine, which is the first thing that happens to it.

7 figures A fabric to fill and a fabric to load. Fill time against the sett of a woven reinforcement, with the two limits a part imposes. Stiffness wants fibre, which wants a close sett; the resin has to arrive before it gels, and the channels between the tows — which is what carries the flow — close as the sett rises. The interval between the two is where a fabric can exist, and it narrows with the size of the part. Cloth doing a job

A fabric to fill and a fabric to load

A reinforcement has to hold as much fibre as possible and still let a resin through it, and the two demands are the same decision pulling opposite ways. Both bounds are computable, the interval between them narrows as the square of the part, and past a certain size it is empty — which is the most useful thing the arithmetic says.

6 figures Colour and weave — 2/2 twill. One interlacement, threaded in two colour orders. What a reader sees is the colour of whichever thread is on the face, so the visible pattern can be something the draft gives no hint of. Pattern and colour

Colour and weave

Thread the same weave with a different order of coloured ends and a pattern appears that is nowhere in the draft. Houndstooth is an ordinary two-and-two twill, and nothing about its interlacement is unusual at all.

7 figures 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. Setting and geometry

Crimp, and why cloth narrows when it is pulled

A thread in cloth is longer than the cloth it crosses. Pull the fabric one way and that extra length is taken out of one direction and put into the other, so the cloth gets narrower without a single fibre stretching.

7 figures 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. After the loom

Relaxation is the crimp coming back

A cloth that shrinks in the wash has not lost any thread. The thread is exactly as long as it was; more of its length is now spent going up and down rather than along, and the difference is the shrinkage, computable to the last figure from the woven geometry alone.

6 figures

All 463 essays · search them

Threads running through

themes, not chapters

A weave is a matrix

Warp up or warp down at every intersection, over a repeat that tiles the cloth. That is not an encoding of a weave — it is the weave, and it makes almost every question about it decidable.

102 essays

Does it hang together

A draft can look entirely reasonable on point paper and describe cloth that falls into two layers, or has threads lying loose on the surface. The failure is invisible and the test is exact.

65 essays

The float decides

How far a thread travels on the face before it goes under is the quantity behind lustre, drape, snagging, abrasion and how close the cloth can be set. Almost nothing else has that reach.

41 essays

Exactly this many

There is no regular satin on six ends, and the reason is a one-line argument about common factors rather than a rule of thumb. Counts in this subject are more often theorems than tallies.

210 essays

A mechanism, not a material

Cloth on the bias stretches half as long again while no thread in it stretches at all. The deformation is kinematic — a trellis closing — and almost every explanation given for it is wrong.

298 essays

Measured, not claimed

Thread count, breathability, the strength of satin: the trade is full of numbers that do not mean what they are taken to mean. Where a claim is refuted here, it is refuted by a computation.

284 essays

Structure before fibre

Most of what a fabric does follows from how it is put together rather than from what it is made of. The same yarn gives a shirting or a satin, and they behave nothing alike.

242 essays