Some natural fibres facts

Fibres, like fabrics, come in many sizes, shapes, and textures. Fibres are either natural or manufactured. A natural fibre is made from plants, trees, or animals. Today, there are four natural fibres commonly used: cotton, linen, wool, silk. Cotton, linen come from plants, and wool and silk come from animals.

Cotton, which grows from the seed pot of the cotton plant, has many uses. It can also be used to make many different types of fabric. All cotton comes from the small cotton boll that is plucked off the cotton plant. Cotton is spun into several kinds of fibre. The fibre is long and very thin. Cotton is used for everything, from baby’s diapers to heavy denim jeans.

Cotton is soft, absorbent, and comfortable to wear in hot weather. Because cotton takes dyes and prints very well, it is often colour-treated. Cotton is often combined with other fabrics. Its one disadvantage is that it wrinkles easily. Fabric manufacturers have learned to treat cotton or to blend it with other fabrics in order to reduce wrinkling.

Linen grows inside the walls of flax plants, which look like tall, slender reeds. It is a cool, strong, and absorbent fabric, much like cotton but not quite as soft.

Linen wrinkles even more easily than cotton. To reduce the amount of wrinkling, it can be treated chemically.

Wool is the most commonly used animal fibre. It comes from sheep, which are raised throughout the world. The hair, or fleece, is shaved or trimmed from the animal and spun into various kinds of fibres. Wool is warmer than either linen or cotton and it resists wrinkling. Wool takes readily to dyes, even though it is water-resistant. When soaked in water, wool fibres weaken and the fabric may shrink. For this reason, wool is often combined with other fibres to prevent shrinking in water. In this way, it can be laundered.

Silk come from silkworms. The silk fibre is often called a filament. This is a very long, fine thread that is released from the mouth of the silkworm as the worm spins a cocoon around itself. The filament hardens when air touches it.

Silk fibres have a natural shine. They are soft and smooth, but also very strong fibres. Silk takes dyes very well. It also wrinkles, but modern fabric manufacturers have found ways to lessen this somewhat. Like wool, silk requires some special care. It is best cared by hand washing or by dry cleaning.

For thousands of years people learned to make fibres themselves. Manufactured fibres are made by chemically changing cellulose or combining two or more chemical compounds and spinning the solutions into fibres.

Perhaps the oldest recorded tough fabrics is hemp (it was already being cultivated in China in 2800 BC).

In medieval times, seemingly about 1.300, a new fibre began to use in most European countries. Its name came to us from the Arabic, which in English became cotton. The early use of cotton was as a stuffing, both of clothing and of upholstery.

After the harvested cotton has been dried. The fibres are separated from their seeds in a process called “ginning”. Following separation the cotton is pressed into bales and wrapped for protection. The next step is “classing” to decide the quality of cotton. The “classer” judge's cotton samples by hand and by eye. The value depends on the length of fibre, its colour, its feel and the amount of remaining trash.

To turn a tightly packed bale of raw cotton with its millions of tangled fibres into a fabric needs a number of specific stages. First of all the cotton fibres have to be spun. Today, spinning is done by very sophisticated machines. The loose, fluffy fibres are then formed into a long sheet that is wound into a roll called a “lap” which is fed into a carding machine that untangles the cotton into single fibres and forms them into a long soft rope called a “sliver”. Several slivers are fed into a drawing machine that combines them into a single sliver, that is finally drawn into a much finer strand of fibres called “roving”. The roving is wound onto a bobbin and drawn out to its final size on a spinning frame, the process is called “ring spinning”. Here it is twisted into yarn. The best quality yarn is combed cotton which is passed a machine that removes short fibres before spinning. This gives a much stronger, cleaner and smoother yarn. The popularity of cotton yarn and fabric is great and growing.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16