I had the opportunity to test the stiffness of my knit materials on and Instron loading machine in the Engineering Lab at MIT. It was pretty fascinating to watch the machine stretch the fabric to failure while recording data such as load and displacement.
This test is seen as a first step to gather a stiffness value based on a uni-axial load. Future tests will incorporate bi-axial loading and eventually off axis loading. Below are the results of testing 4 knit patterns.
