Woven and interlocking materials

Woven and interlocking materials

Congress canvas is a form of mono-canvas made from cotton, with a mesh count of 24 per inch. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a major producer of this type of canvas was the German firm of Zweigart und Sawitzki.

Cordonnet is a French term used to describe a thick cotton or silk thread that is used to outline lace designs (both hand and machine forms). The outline may be worked in a variety of stitches, such as buttonhole stitch, chain stitch (needle and tambour forms), running stitch, or in couching.  A cordonnet thread was used, for instance, for the famous Mechlin lace.

Cotton canvas is a nineteenth century term for a very fine canvas produced in Britain, France and Germany for Berlin wool work and comparable forms of embroidery. Both limp and stiffened forms were available. The French was regarded as the best, while the German version was seen as inferior. Often every tenth thread of the German cotton canvas was dyed yellow.

Cretonne is a decorative material with large, printed floral patterns. The term cretonne derives from the name of the village of Creton in Normandy, France. Here the local people produced a strong, coarse woven material with a hemp warp and a linen weft.

Embroidery canvas is an open-weave canvas, especially suitable for various types of decorative needlework, including counted thread embroidery. It has been used since the early seventeenth century and became especially popular in the nineteenth century with the advent of Berlin wool work.

The term even weave, or balanced weave, indicates that the size and spacing of the warp threads are more or less the same as those of the weft threads. So there might be, for example, ten warp threads per cm and ten weft threads per cm.

An extended tabby is a tabby weave in which the warp (ends) and weft (picks) threads are normally used in groups of two or more. Sometimes, however, the warps are used in pairs while the weft threads are single, or the other way around.

Flattened French canvas, or French canvas, is a nineteenth century form of canvas widely used in France. It was made in cotton, flax or hemp, and sometimes cotton with flax.

Flax canvas is a general term for canvas made from linen warp and weft threads.

Source: CAULFEILD, Sophia Frances Anne and Blanche C. SAWARD (1882), The Dictionary of Needlework: An Encyclopaedia of Artistic, Plain and Fancy Needlework, London: L. Upcott Gill, p. 210.

From the end of the nineteenth century there were various products sold under the general heading of glass cloth. These included (a) textiles made from glass fibre; (b) a fine cloth coated with finely powdered glass, which was used for polishing or smoothing surfaces, and (c) a type of English linen cloth woven in a tabby weave with checks and/or warp stripes of various colours, including blue, green and red.

Holland or Holland cloth is a tabby woven, matt linen cloth used as a furniture cover, window cover, jar cover, and so forth.

Huckaback cloth is an absorbent cotton or linen material made from a self-patterning weave (patterns in the cloth are made by changing the weave in specific places; compare a damask weave) with a tabby ground and small, all-over motifs in offset rows.

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