why

Mothheaven has a post in which the question came up, “why knit?”

For me, this question naturally proliferates into “Why weave? Why spin? Why sew?”

My first answer: intellectual challenge.

We all know there are challenges in creating things, through knitting sewing spinning crochet macramé kumihimo or whatever medium. There are challenges of fit, of proper use of fiber, of gauge or sett, of design. In addition to all those though, there are many other largely unrecognized problems in the field of textiles. I use “problems” here without negative connotation, but in the mathematical sense, to mean some sort of question or situation in which the answer or resolution is not immediately clear.

Did you ever wonder why woven fabrics stay together? Or did it ever occur to you that there could be interlacements that could fall apart? There’s a mathematical algorithm for determining whether a fabric will be whole. It’s not out of reach, but it’s not trivial.

Are weaving drawdowns alluring to you? Some mathematicians have studied the geometry of common weave structures (see for instance The Geometry of Fabrics, Branko Grunbaum (With G. C. Shephard) in "Geometrical Combinatorics", F. C. Holroyd and R. J. Wilson, eds. Pitman, Boston-London-Melbourne 1984, pp. 77 - 98. Google Grunbaum for more). It turns out that from a mathematical point of view, one can ask questions about weave structures that are not easy to solve. You may have wondered too why so many supposedly brand-spanking new cellular automata designs look like—weaving patterns! A fact which I believe the author of this book overlooked. Compare some of these to crepes in Oelsner.

How many different kinds of braids can you make with 15 strands? How do you measure the energy in a piece of yarn, and is it possible to calculate what effect this will have on cloth? How do you cut a piece of cloth most economically to make a garment? How do you cut a given garment from narrow cloth? How many color and weave effects are possible using plain weave with two colors and a 10-end repeat? How do you create all the plane symmetries in a woven or knitted cloth?

If mathematics and geometry and symmetry leave you cold, you can find innumerable historical, anthropological or ethnographic questions. What happened in the New World when sheep were introduced? How did the desire for certain colors of dye fuel the passion for exploration? How was the thread for Columbus’ sails spun? How did guilds form? What happens when two different textile traditions meet? How did weaving technology influence the development of computers? If you don’t care about the past and only look forward, you might be interested in questions of how to spin spider silk , or how to develop a loom that will produce triaxial weaving, or what kinds of new fiber combinations will allow devoré.

And these are just a sparse handful of the myriad of questions surrounding textile techniques and practices. Making and researching textiles requires intelligence, dedication and skill. The truly great textile workers I have known are people with all these traits and at least one more: they love a challenge.