COMMISSION I / III
LINEN HEM
Five stitches along the chalked line.
MENDING HALL No. 4 / A LINEN PANEL IN THE HOOP
Every stitch
reshapes the hang.
Close three commissions with a needle and a running thread. The panel is slack, it is hanging, and the lamp rakes it from the left. Pull a seam and the tension travels into cloth you have not touched yet. Pull it too hard and a fibre goes, white and permanent.
- PLACE click the chalked socket, or J
- TENSION hold K, Shift, or right-mouse
- KINK C — set a pleat, anchor the head
- SEVER E, or long-press a seam head
NEEDLE DOWN
Held.
The panel keeps its tension. The lamp keeps its angle.
SHIFT CLOSED
Crisp.
- SEAMS
- SCARS
- SPREAD
HOW THE LINEN BEHAVES
Read the puckers, not the numbers.
A slack panel swings with the hoop and hangs in soft folds. Draw a seam tight and the excess has to go somewhere: it banks up beside the stitch as a pucker, and that pucker catches the raking light. Where the light goes coral, the cloth is close to giving. Where it goes white and hot, you have about half a second — let the tension off and it will back down.
A kink sets a worked pleat. The pleat takes up the extra length, so the unstitched cloth around it relaxes, and the head it sits on cannot be severed. Three pleats for the whole shift, and each one is visible in the finished drape.
The mitred turn on commission two gathers both runs into one corner, and that corner is the thinnest cloth on the panel. A scuff — a torn fibre — is white, permanent, and no ending removes it.