Textiles keep us warm in our houses, cover our bodies, and decorate our world. Humans have been making cloth for a long, long time. They've used every fiber you can imagine: wool or hair from animals, fluff or stems or inner bark from plants.
Fabrics today, whether commercially made or handmade, are still made from fibers. Once you've collected the fiber, there are 3 basic ways to turn it into fabric.
- Mash the fibers together into a mat, like wool felt or bark cloth.
- Twist the fibers into thread or yarn, then loop a continous thread using crochet hooks, knitting needles, or other tools. T-shirt fabric is a knitted fabric made with very fine thread.
- Twist the fibers into thread or yarn, then interlace two sets of threads on a loom. Denim fabric in jeans is woven like this, again with very fine thread.
Let's consider these last two methods more closely.
In the knitted swatch above, you can see loops making up the fabric along the top, bottom, and sides. The V-shaped stitches in the middle look like these loops on the other side of the fabric.
To weave fabric, the weaver works with two sets of thread/yarn. The loom holds one set of threads, called the warp, under tension. The weaver works another thread, called the weft, over and under the warp threads in a specific pattern, also known as a weave structure.
In this woven fabric, the weaver used the same yarn for warp and weft but separated it into two sets. The warp yarn, in blue and pink, went onto the loom in a color pattern. Then she wound the weft yarn, in shades of pink, around a shuttle. As the shuttle went across the loom, it went over, under, over, under the warp yarn on one row. On the next row, it went under, over, under, over.
This weave structure, called plain weave, can be dressed up with colors, different sizes of yarn, textured yarn, and other design elements. In the next woven sample, the warp yarns are all handspun, one at a constant diameter and the other in a thick-and-thin textured look. The weaver used different weft colors.
Weavers can choose from many different weave structures, color patterns, and types of yarn. Every different option will change the fabric's look.