Mind the Nap - And I'm Not Talkin' About Sleeping!‍

Both of these textiles have “nap”. This means that both of them are “directional”.  At this point in the process, you make a decision about how you want to use this in the look (and feel) of the piece.

The fur will look one way when the light shines on it if the nap is smoothed down and it will look very different if you push the nap of the fur against its natural way to lay.  This “shading” can occur with any textile with “nap”, velvet and corduroy are two other examples. The diagonal weave of the twill has a definite visual pattern.  These can all go one way, be set at 90 degrees to each other to create a checkerboard or be “random”.  Any combination of these visual attributes is fine, it’s just best to consider them and make a deliberate plan as you move forward with the assembly of the throw.  In my case, I wanted all the twill pattern of the denim to be in the same direction patch to patch – row to row.  I also wanted all the fur to be in the same direction across the final piece.  So you could literally “pet” the throw with the grain of the “nap” from top to bottom!

Once I had made these decisions about how I wanted the nap of the front (twill) and back (fur) of the squares to be, I made sure all the squares were oriented in the same way in their stacks and then placed the stacks correctly next to each other.  This way, when I reached for a square of the twill and a square of the fur to assemble them into one patch, I was sure they were oriented correctly to each other.

Although I will say that I double and triple checked them throughout the assembly process.  I’ve been known to mess this type of orientation up on several previous projects!

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