Coptic textiles had many uses during Egypt's Christian period, including bed sheets and covers, towels, napkins, tablecloths and carrying sacks, while in churches and other public buildings, these decorative fabrics were used for curtains and hangings.
The development of pattern weaving is one of the important achievements of the Coptic weavers that distinguishes their textiles from those of the Ancient Egyptians. Patterned textiles were brought into the mainstream around the time of Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt in the fourth century BC. Some Greek textiles were patterned and featured the use of dyed wool. Patterned textiles were valued because their production was quite labor intensive.
Coptic textiles are characterized by the "S-twist" of thread. After washing, the natural flax fibers have an inherent sense of rotation, in the anti-clockwise direction. Therefore, when they are spun into thread, they were twisted in this direction, which is called "S-twist." Wool does not have a tendency to rotation, so it followed convention that wool was also spun in the "S-twist" technique.
The Egyptians used the weaving techniques of tabby weave, half basket weave, and looped or soumak. Tabby weave is the simplest form of weaving, consisting of horizontal threads (weft) interweaving with vertical threads (warp). Soumak had the effect of making distinct outlines of the designs. Other techniques they used were brocading and tapestry. The tapestry technique allowed wool decorations to be woven into the surrounding linen. The Copts invented the flying shuttle technique, which uses a second shuttle to insert an extra linen weft thread into the fabric.
Most commonly, textiles during the Coptic period were sued for clothing which, during that time period, most frequently took the form of a tunic, or rectangular shirt-like garment which was usually fastened at the waist by a belt. Textiles were also used for belts, cloaks and shawls. The tunics of Copts was most often made of plain wool or linen and adorned with either a single vertical band (clavus) that ran down the center of the garment, or two vertical bands (clavi) that fell over each shoulder and ran down to the knee or the bottom of the garment on both the front and back.
As early as the Pharaonic period of Egypt's New Kingdom, and because of increasing contact with the Near East, a fashion developed in Egypt of wearing ornate garments decorated with colorful decorations. This fashion disappeared during the Late Pharaonic Period only to reappear during Roman times, with the spread of the use of wool. Flax (linen), which was used almost exclusively until the Greek period was very difficult to dye, but in contrast, wool allowed colors to be applied that have lasted into our own time. There also evolved silk garments with shimmering colors that obviously had their origins in the east, consisting of caftans, leggings and tunics, for example. As in the pharaonic period, Coptic fabrics remained well known for a long time and even in distant lands. For example, in India, they were called kabati, which comes from the plural form of the Arabic Qibt (Copt, Egyptian).
The decorations on unbleached flax and purple wool reproduce geometrical and vegetal motifs identical with those of the sculptures and mosaics of the same period. In Egypt, the paintings of the third and fourth centuries often represent the dead clad in garments ornamented in the same way. These fashions spread throughout the whole of the Mediterranean basin, as one can examine in mosaics (Piazza Armerina, Sicily) and paintings in the Roman catacombs.
However, thanks to the dry climate and sandy subsoil, these fabrics have mostly only survived to our own time in an unrivalled state of preservation in Egypt. There are sites such as Antinoe and Akhmin where tens of thousands of these textiles have been unearthed, particularly in the necropolises. This is due to the fact that when, in the fourth century mummification was no longer practiced, the dead were buried in their clothes. Sometimes these were very sumptuous, consisting of tunics, cloaks, shirts of fine linen, shawls, headdresses with hair nets and shoes. These dead were also often surrounded by a substantial amount of funerary furniture and with large fabric panels adorned in the same patterns as the clothing. In fact, these panels may have been originally used as household furnishings such as altar covers, blankets and curtains, and later reused as shrouds.
One particular series includes large printed linen panels, of which only fragments remain. Like the great "Antinoe veil" (fourth century, Paris, Louvre Museum), they had several tiers of decorations. In order to create this effect, the material was immersed in a bath of dye, but 
certain parts of it were covered with a protective substance such as clay or wax to prevent that area from being dyed.
The decorations in tapestry using the "Gobelins" stitch have backgrounds of cloth or tapestry. The decorations themselves and the background were rarely woven separately and later sewn together. Most often, they were woven together on the loom. Thus, tunics were made in a single piece or in three pieces and then assembled. The intricate dye work was done in specialized shops which used mostly vegetal dyes, including madder and Mediterranean lichen for the reds, indigo and woad for the blues and reseda, pomegranate and saffron for the yellows. Rarely used in Egypt were the animal dyes like the kermes of a Mediterranean red oak and the Armenian cochineal, where were all very expensive. There is no trace in Coptic fabrics of the true purple color extracted from the shell of murex brandaris which was so highly prized in the Roman Empire.