A Journey Through Fabric Basics
Fabric/What is Textile Fabric?
Fabric is a flexible planar substance constructed from solutions, fibres, yarns, or fabrics, in any combination. Textile fabrics can be produced directly from webs of fibres by bonding, fusing or interlocking to make non-woven fabrics and felts, but their physical properties tend to restrict their potential end-usage. The mechanical manipulation of yarn into fabric is the most versatile method of manufacturing textile fabrics for a wide range of end-uses.
Fabric can be defined in many ways. These are –
- Cloth of any kind of product that is manufactured from fibers; either natural or synthetic.
- Fabric is a kind of basic textiles materials made of fibers or yarns in the form of thick or thin sheet.
- A cloth produced especially by knitting, weaving or nonwoven process.
- So, from above we can conclude that “Fabric or cloth is a flexible artificial material that is made by a network of natural or artificial fibers, threads or yarns which is formed by work as in textiles and fabric is produced by using weaving, knitting or nonwoven process.”
Types of Fabric
There are three principal methods of mechanically manipulating yarn into textile fabrics:
Interweaving (interlacing or interlacement)
Interlooping
Intertwining
- Interweaving:
It is the intersection or interlacement of two sets of straight threads, warp (ends) and weft (picks or filling), which cross and interweave at right angles to each other.
- Interlooping:
It consists of forming yarn(s) into loops, each of which is typically only released after a succeeding loop has been formed and intermeshed with it so that a secure ground loop structure is achieved. The loops are also held together by the yarn passing from one to the next. Knitting is the most common method of interlooping and is second only to weaving as a method of manufacturing textile products.
- Intertwining and twisting:
It includes a number of techniques, such as braiding and knotting, where threads are caused to intertwine with each other at right angles or some other angles. These techniques tend to produce special constructions whose uses are limited to very specific purposes.
There is another method of manipulating directly fibre into textile fabrics is so called nonwoven process. This relatively young branch of the textile industry has expanded enormously after the second world-war because of the high production rates and the resulting cost savings.
Nonwovens are flexible, porous products consisting of one or more fibre layers. The separate fibres may either be preferentially oriented in one direction or may be deposited in a random manner. They are bonded by chemical, thermal or mechanical processes into textile products.
Fabric Classification at a glance
Flow Chart of Textile Processing/Textile Fabric
