Patent ID: 8388804

Claim:
A method of making a fabric-creped absorbent cellulosic sheet, the method comprising: (a) applying a jet of papermaking furnish to a forming wire, the jet having a jet velocity, and the forming wire moving at a forming wire velocity, the difference between the jet velocity and the forming wire velocity being referred to as the jet/wire velocity delta; (b) compactively dewatering the papermaking furnish to form a nascent web; (c) applying the nascent web to a transfer surface that is moving at a transfer surface speed; (d) fabric-creping the nascent web from the transfer surface at a consistency of from about 30 percent to about 60 percent utilizing a creping fabric that is traveling at a fabric-creping speed, the fabric-creping speed being lower than the transfer surface speed, the fabric-creping step occurring under pressure in a fabric creping nip defined between the transfer surface and the creping fabric, such that the nascent web is creped from the transfer surface and redistributed on the creping fabric to form a creped web with a reticulum having a plurality of interconnected regions of different local basis weights, including at least (i) a plurality of fiber enriched regions having a high local basis weight with an orientation bias in the cross-machine direction (CD), interconnected by way of (ii) a plurality of lower local basis weight linking regions; (e) drying the creped web; and (f) controlling the jet/wire velocity delta and the fabric-creping step, such that the dry machine direction to cross-machine direction (MD/CD) tensile ratio of the dried web is about at most 1.5.