Wharfe Drill

Three up, one down. The tie-up raises three of the four shafts on every pick, so on the face of the cloth you are looking almost entirely at warp, and on the back almost entirely at weft. Put a dark warp against a pale weft and the two sides of the cloth are frankly different colours — which is the whole trick behind every pair of jeans ever made.

Warp-faced construction is also why this family of cloth wears the way it does. Abrasion takes the surface of the warp floats first, and because the indigo sits on the outside of a ring-spun yarn rather than through it, the wear shows as the yarn lightening rather than as the cloth thinning. Wharfe fades at the knee and the pocket edge long before it goes anywhere near failing.

The steep diagonal — 63 degrees rather than the 45 of a balanced twill — comes from the same asymmetry, and it is a quick way to identify the structure across a room.

At 385 gsm this is a working cloth. It will crock in the first few washes as loose indigo comes off; wash it separately twice and it settles. We supply it un-sanforised unless you ask, so allow for shrinkage of about three per cent on the length.