Every piece of cloth in your house is one of these two things. There is no third thing. Once you can tell them apart you can never stop seeing it.
One shirt with buttons on the front. One t-shirt, or a jumper, or a sock. Put them next to each other on the table.
Take a bit of the shirt between two hands and pull it across, the way your shoulders go, not up and down. Then do exactly the same to the t-shirt.
The shirt hardly moves. The t-shirt goes wide and then springs back. You have just found the difference, and everything below is only the explanation.
Get your eye right down on the shirt, near a seam where the light catches it. You will see a grid, like a tiny basket. Threads going up and down, threads going across, over and under each other in turn. That is woven.
Now the t-shirt. No grid. Rows of little V shapes, all pointing the same way, like a field of arrows. Each V is one loop pulled through the loop underneath it. That is knitted.
In the woven one the threads are already lying straight and pulled tight. To make it wider you would have to stretch the thread itself, and thread does not want to do that.
In the knitted one every loop is a little bend of spare thread. Pull it and the bend opens out. Nothing stretched. It just got straighter. Let go and it curls back up.
Jeans. A towel. A sock. Curtains. A tea towel. A hat. Say which one it is before you pull it, then pull it and find out if you were right. Socks catch people out.
| Woven | Knitted | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is made | Threads laid in a grid, over and under, on a loom. | One long thread pulled through loops of itself, again and again. |
| Pull it sideways | It fights you. The threads are already straight and tight. | It gives. A loop can be pulled longer before the thread itself is asked to stretch. |
| Snag one thread | One hole. It stays a hole. | A run. Pull it and the loops undo each other all the way down. |
| How many sizes it needs | Lots. It cannot stretch to fit you, so it has to be cut to fit you. | Fewer. It stretches to meet you halfway. |
| Ours | The Greenbush Check flannel. | The Log Off tee and the Nordic pullover. |
The last row is a real problem we have, not a fact for the page. Our flannel is woven, so it needs five sizes cut and sewn separately and a mill that will weave our own pattern. Our knitted things need fewer sizes and far less arguing. Woven is the harder thing to make, every single time.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is construction.
Construction means how a cloth was put together, and it is the first question anybody in the trade asks about a garment. Before the colour, before the size, before the price. Woven or knitted decides how it stretches, how it wears out and how many sizes it has to be made in.