Mundane Arcane
This has messed with my mind for the last year. It's incredible but also incredibly mundane.

We have a rotary clothes line - you know the thing like an inverted umbrella with a single piece of clothes line that wraps all around it. Last summer my wife hung out our little boy's duvet which had been washed. It's a synthetic 1/4 sized duvet with a kind of outer skin made from white porous material. I work from home and can see the clothesline if I look up so I know nobody could tamper with it.

A few hours later I came to take the duvet down but it was stuck to the line. On closer examination the clothes line had been woven through the outer lining of the duvet in a crude running stitch (yeah I know what that is - I made pencil cases out of felt at junior school). That was physically impossible. It had me completely stumped. There was, and is, no rational explanation how that could have happened. The pegs had not forced the line through the outer lining. It required one end of the line to have been unhooked from the base or end-arm (not near where the duvet was), physically unwound removing all the hanging clothes, threaded through the outer lining then rewound back onto the line replacing all the clothes in the same place. This would have had to happen while I was working in close proximity to it and there was no one in else in the house that day (my wife went out). I know this did not happen because the spider webs and rust on the clothes line were untouched (we live like bloody students still).

I still don't know how this happened. My wife saw it too and was equally stumped. I wish we'd taken a picture to bore people with. In the end we had to rip it off the line which left a 6" tear in the outer layer.

Mundane but inexplicable. Boring but impossible. I might write a book about it or get Derek Acora (is he dead? his spirit then) to check it out.
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Thu 8 Sep 2016, 12:06, 6 replies)

Magnets.
And I am glad you didn't take a picture
( spanishfly is so fucking sexy people impersonate him, Fri 9 Sep 2016, 17:20, closed)

Spooky

(MC Chicken Sandwich Me gusta ver la pornografía de los milfs., Sat 10 Sep 2016, 21:00, closed)

Short fibres
I've seen something similar happen with polyester duvets on washing lines. I think if you'd looked carefully at the "outer skin" fabric you'd see that it was made of lots of fairly short fibres, so the washing line can work its way "through" the fabric.
(ersiffly, Sun 18 Sep 2016, 20:13, closed)

Looked at that
It was a fairly porous outer polyester skin but there were no pegs on this section so I could not see how it could be pushe/worked through. Even if pushed through it would then have to self-seal around the line in 3 or 4 places. I had to grip and rip it off with some force (having slid it up and down the line a bit first) - not a huge amount but my 6 year old would probably have struggled to rip it off.

Inexplicable. I've never tried to recreate it so for the sake of all those B3tans hanging on the outcome of this post I might try to do that...
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 19 Sep 2016, 10:28, closed)

Short fibres that stick together
Hard to describe, but I mean the fabric is made of short fibres that grip each other, but with the wind flapping the duvet around the line can push fibres apart to get through the fabric, then the fibres stick back to each other. So different from something like a cotton sheet where each piece of cotton is as long as the sheet is long or wide. Back in the day there were hundreds of weaving experts on B3ta who could explain better than I can, but then the industrial revolution came and the spinner jennies took their jobs, or something.
(ersiffly, Mon 19 Sep 2016, 23:00, closed)

See what you mean but still...
It's the best explanation so far but I fibres cannot be too short because they were in a criss-cross pattern as I recall which means that they had to be longer than at least one or two criss-cross sections - will investigate. Damn those spinning jennies. Up with the Luddites!
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Tue 20 Sep 2016, 8:27, closed)