Sprang

Sprang. The original stretchy fabric.
This is some of the sprang work I have been doing.  The yellow and the purple are both of wool, and the blue is of cotton.  Wool is MUCH nicer to work with.  The nature of sprang plays a lot with the twist in yarn, and the cotton has no natural spring of its own.  By the end I was basically working with collections of singles that weren't staying together very well.  I kept doing ply-split spranging and then having to go back and fix it.  These are all the simplest pattern.  Alternating rows of
1F (1B 1F)rep 1B
2F (1B 1F)rep 2B
which makes no sense unless you have any experience with sprang.  Basically sprang is a continuous warp around the dowels in the pic above giving a front layer of threads and a back layer.  Your hand is placed between the layers and 1F means that 1 thread from the back is brought Forward, and 1B means 1 thread from the front is sent Backward.  repeat, placing the small sticks (dpns) in the place where your hand was and spreading apart (1 up and 1 down) to create the new shed of front and back ready for the next row.