Fabric defect · Knit fabric - Needle lines in knit fabric: causes and how they count

ConductVision Textile is designed to flag each defect with its place on the roll, its size, its points and a still image. Your inspector names the defect and confirms or dismisses it.

On the defect map in the roll report, a needle line is a line along the roll.

A U.S. military glossary of knitting imperfections defines a needle line as "a vertical line in fabric following one wale line" ¹. Its entry for vertical lines, "lengthwise marks occurring in knitted fabric," adds that they are "sometimes called doglines or needle lines" ¹. Cotton Incorporated's defect glossary gives the cause of its example: "The result of a bent needle" ².

The line can be a gap as well as a mark. A university module on knit defects describes vertical stripes as "longitudinal gaps in the fabric," where "the space between adjacent wales is irregular" ³. The same module calls oily soil stripes along the wales needle stripes ³. Those are stains, not faults in the stitches, and the oil stains page covers them.

A needle line runs along the roll in one wale, the column of loops that one needle knits ^{1, 6}. Cotton Incorporated lists its needle line example as a warp line, or vertical line ².

Check greige fabric on the knitting machine for needle lines, the first remedy one paper on knitting faults gives ⁴.

A needle line that runs on along the roll is a running defect. One buyer manual, which follows the 4-point system of ASTM D5430, gives up to 4 points to each linear yard or metre in which a continuous running defect exceeds 9 inches, and no linear yard gets more than 4 points ⁷. A needle line through a whole roll can cost 4 points in every yard. A short line is scored by its length: 1 point up to 3 inches, 2 points over 3 up to 6 inches, 3 points over 6 up to 9 inches and 4 points over 9 inches ⁸.