Quote Originally Posted by IRONFISH45 View Post
Selvages are the tight woven edge of the fabric, the part the loom grasps. The selvage prevents fraying and revelling, it is densely woven. Since the selvage is dense the fabric behaves differently than the selvage. Puckering, twisting, shrinking and other odd things are likely to happen using the selvage. Selvages are meant as waste.
As a weaver I have to comment on this. The loom does not grasp the fabric here. The weft turns around at this point, and it can have different characteristics because of this. Sometimes a tool spreads out the material and damages the selvedge, but not necessarily. The selvedge naturally occurs in weaving with a continuous weft, and by definition is no denser than the rest of the fabric, unless the weaver chooses to pack more lengthwise threads here to help prevent it from pulling in and breaking threads. (Which is common in commercial fabric.) Often the weaver expects that it will be trimmed as waste, but again, not necessarily. I know a lot of internet definitions say it is "the tightly woven edge," but that isn't really correct... it can even be looser woven, if that is what the weaver designs, and it is still a selvedge... literally "self edge." Functionally, in this discussion, it can be described as "the tightly woven edge," but technically it isn't completely true.