Donegal tweed manufactured for centuries it took on its modern form in the 1880s, largely due to the pioneering work of English philanthropist Alice Rowland Hart. While the weavers in County Donegal produce a number of different tweed fabrics, including herringbone and check patterns, the area is best known for a plain-weave cloth of differently-coloured warp and weft, with small pieces of yarn in various colours woven in at irregular intervals to produce a heathered effect. Such fabric is often labelled as "donegal" (with a lowercase "d") regardless of its provenance. Along with Harris Tweed manufactured in the Scottish Highlands, Donegal is
Knitted fabric edges are known as the "selvages"; the word derives from "self-edges", meaning that the stitches do not need to be secured by anything else. Many types of selvages have been developed, with different elastic and ornamental properties. Edges are introduced within a knitted fabric for button holes, pockets, or decoration, by binding/casting off and re-casting on again (horizontal) or by knitting the fabrics on either side of an edge separately. Two knitted fabrics can be joined by embroidery-based grafting methods, most commonly the Kitchener stitch. New wales can be begun from any of the edges of a knitted fabric; this