The Fashion Files
Nearly every piece of cloth in your house was made out of thread by somebody who had to decide, thread by thread, what it was going to look like. Six things to do below. Each card says what you need before you start, and each one ends.
Our plaid, drawn from its 108 numbers. Not a photograph. The cloth is on order.
Design a colorway. Swap the four yarns in our plaid and see which of the twenty four shirts you like best.
Six things to do.
In this order if you like. The first one takes five minutes.
- Start
Woven or knitted?
Fetch a shirt and a sweater. Pull them both sideways. One of them fights you and one of them does not, and the reason is the whole of how cloth is made.
About five minutes.You need: A shirt, A sweater or a t-shirtTeaches: Construction - Start
Count the threads in ten millimeters.
Put a ruler on a shirt and count how many threads fit in ten millimeters. Then do a towel, a dish towel and a bedsheet, and find out which thing in your house is the finest.
About fifteen minutes.You need: A ruler with millimeters, Three different cloths, Good lightTeaches: Ends per inch - Start
Draw our plaid, one thread at a time.
Our flannel has a hundred and eight threads in it before the pattern starts again. Here is the recipe and a grid. Color it in, then write your own recipe and see what comes out.
Half an hour, or an afternoon.You need: A printer, Colored pencilsTeaches: Sett - Start
Where the fiber came from.
Three of our things start in three different places. Two of them start almost exactly the same distance away, and they get charged different amounts at the door. Go and read the labels in your own house first.
About twenty minutes.You need: Five things with labels in them, A pencil, PaperTeaches: Duty - Start
How much does a shirt weigh?
Weigh a t-shirt on the kitchen scale, measure it flat and divide. That one sum is how a mill describes every roll of cloth, and our flannel has a number to beat.
About fifteen minutes.You need: A kitchen scale, A ruler or tape measure, A t-shirtTeaches: GSM - Start
Design a colorway.
Keep our plaid's hundred and eight threads and swap the four yarns. Two of the twenty four ways are ours, and one of them might be yours.
About ten minutes.You need: Nothing but the pageTeaches: Colorway
Our plaid is 108 numbers long.
This is the whole recipe. Count out this many threads of each color, in this order, and then start the list again. Do it going up and down and again going side to side, and where they cross you get a plaid. Weavers call the list a sett, and ours packs about 54 threads into every inch, so one repeat is roughly two inches wide.
- 4rust
- 28pine
- 4cream
- 8pine
- 24charcoal
- 8pine
- 4cream
- 28pine
- = 108 threads, then start again
We are waiting on twenty meters of our plaid.
The Greenbush Check exists as a recipe and as a picture. We cannot hold it as cloth yet. We wrote to four mills at the end of August, and one in Portugal said yes: twenty meters of our plaid are on order, due in the middle of November. Until that cloth arrives, the shirt is a hundred and eight numbers and nothing else.
Can you help. Nothing yet, and that is the honest answer. Waiting on somebody else is most of this job.
Cloth words.
These are the real ones. A weaver uses every word on this list, so you may as well learn it the way they say it the first time.
- Warp
- The threads that run up and down, put on the loom first and pulled tight. They are the ones that have to be strong, because everything else is threaded through them.
- Weft
- The threads that run side to side, woven over and under the warp. Warp is the fence, weft is the thing weaving through the fence.
- Sett
- The recipe for a plaid, written as a list of colors and how many threads of each. Ours is 108 threads long and then it starts again.
- Repeat
- How far you go before the pattern does the same thing again. Find the repeat and you have understood the whole cloth.
- Ends per inch (EPI)
- How many threads are squeezed into one inch. More threads in the same inch means a finer, denser cloth, and usually a pricier one.
- Nap
- The fuzz. Flannel is brushed after it is woven to pull the fibers up, and the fuzz is the reason it feels warm before it is warm.
- Colorway
- The same pattern in different colors. Same sett, different yarn, and it looks like a different shirt.
- Lab dip
- A little card of yarn dyed to the exact color you asked for, mailed to you to check before anybody dyes a mile of it.
- Sanforized
- Shrunk on purpose at the mill so it will not shrink much on you. Ours is allowed three percent and no more.
- Yarn-dyed
- The thread was colored before it was woven, so the pattern goes all the way through. Printed means the color was stamped on top afterwards, and it wears off.
- Duty
- Money a country charges for letting a thing in over its border. Every kind of garment has its own number, and two countries can agree to make it nothing. Distance has nothing to do with it.
- Micron
- A thousandth of a millimeter, and how the fineness of a fiber is measured. Good alpaca is nineteen to twenty two microns. The finer the number, the softer it feels.