What are fabrics made of?

I never knew that such a simple question would be so fascinating and vast in its answer.

I attended a course at the London School of Fashion about Textiles as I wanted to have a good grounding knowledge on fabric, their qualities and what was best to use for what project. It was certainly eye opening and worth attending the course. I shall try and summarise what I learned, but nothing will ever replace sitting in a classroom with a teacher showing you what she means when she talks about a particular fabric.

Let's start from the beginning...

A fabric is usually made of yarns. A yarn in turn is a generic name for a strand of fibres or filaments twisted together to form a suitable, continuous strand for producing fabric.

A yarn can consist of fibres or filaments. But what is the difference between fibres and filaments? Fibres are produced by spinning materials together. Filaments are usually a single strand. Examples of fibres are wool, cotton, acetate, polyester. The best example of a filament is silk.

Here are some examples of fibres:

Acetate Fibres

Alpaca Fibres

Camel Fibres

Cashmere Fibres

Polyester Fibres

Wool Fibres

There are eight ways to construct a fabric out of the yarn:

1. Weaving: Interlacing of two sets of yarns at the right angles to each other. It has a Warp (lengthwise threads), Weft (crosswise threads) and Selvage (formed by the weft that loops around outside the warp to form a fine edge that does not roll up)
2. Knitting: Made by 2 or more needles and a minimum of one continuous yarn or set of yarns
3. Felting: Making fabric by matting fibres together by heat, steam and pressure
4. Bonding: Pressing fibres together into thin webs held either together by adhesive
5. Laminating: 3 or more layers usually with a foam in the middle
6. Braiding: interlacing the three or more yarns over and under to form a narrow flat tubular fabric
7. Knotting: Tying yarns together when they cross each other
8. Crochetting: construction method using one hook. A chain of loops is formed from a single yarn

At this point I must add that leather is not a textile fabric because it is not made of fibres and not constructed in any method mentioned above; and paper is not either.

After constructing the fabric, it then goes to the Fabric Dyer, Finisher and/or Printer. The better quality fabrics are made from yarns that have already been dyed. However, most fabrics we buy are usually from a Fabric Converter, where the companies buy the fabric in grey and they do their own colouring and finishing.

Of course, all of the above has further classification that affects the finish product, this we call its class. We divide the fibres between two classes: Natural or Man-Made.

Why is this important to know? Because from the choice of fibres or filaments you start shaping what the end product will eventually be: your dress, your coat and even your underwear. What fabric you choose is also based on how it is constructed and how it feels to the touch. And this touch starts with the fibres or filaments that will make the yarn that eventually makes the fabric.

This is a vast subject that I have only touched on this blog post. We spent almost two days just going through fibres and filaments and had many examples shown to us. A fascinating lengthy subject. In the future I shall write about the different types of fabrics we buy and how we source them and how this affects the choice of clothes we choose to make out of particular fabrics.

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