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Know Your Knits
comments (0) November 19th, 2008 in sewing, garment construction, fundamentals
Threads Magazine, editor
9 users recommend
A weft knit is made with a single yarn
In a knit fabric, a vertical column of stitches is called a wale, and a horizontal row, a course.
Knit fabrics are made in one of two basic ways
Understanding the ways in which knit fabrics are manufactured will help you see why the topic of knits is so complex and why different knit fabrics behave in such dissimilar ways. Unlike a woven fabric, which is composed of a series of warp (lengthwise) yarns interlaced with a series of weft (crosswise) yarns, a knit fabric is made up of one or more yarns formed into a series of loops that create rows and columns of vertically and horizontally interconnected stitches. A vertical column of stitches is called a wale, and a horizontal row of stitches, a course.
Although, in a woven fabric, the terms warp and weft refer to the direction of the two sets of yarns making up the fabric, in a knit fabric, these terms describe the direction in which the fabric is produced: A weft knit—which is what hand-knitted fabric is—is one made with a single yarn that’s looped to create horizontal rows, or courses, with each row built on the previous row. A warp knit is made with multiple parallel yarns that are simultaneously looped vertically to form the fabric (see the drawings above). Both warp and weft knits can be made either on a circular knitting machine, which produces a tube of fabric, or on a flat-bed knitting machine, which delivers flat yardage.
Four basic stitches—All knit fabrics, even exotic novelty knits like laces and jacquards, whatever their structure, are composed of four basic stitches: a knit, or plain, stitch; a purl, or reverse-knit, stitch; a missed stitch, which produces a float of yarn on the fabric's wrong side; and a tuck stitch, which creates an open space in the fabric (see the drawings below).
Four stitches make up all knit fabrics
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| Knit stitch |
Purl stitch | |
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| Missed-stitch |
Tuck stitch |
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