It’s crucial to choose the fabric from which your clothes are created. This decision may have an impact on how the particular piece of clothing looks, feels, wears, lasts, or serves its intended purpose. The clothing you wear every day to work is never more crucial in terms of fabric sustainable clothing. Your job attire needs to be both cozy and reliable. It must be both fashionable and useful. The average person will spend more time than any other article of clothing—possibly with the exception of sleepwear—wearing their uniform. Your uniform’s fabric matters, and there is now a larger selection than ever thanks to modern fabrics.
Today, each fabric used to make apparel has unique properties and applications. It’s critical to comprehend the properties of various textiles while selecting apparel as crucial as your uniform. This article is the first of a series that will examine the various fabrics and common fabric manufacturing techniques.
We’ll talk about textiles including cotton, wool, nylon, polyester, and many other types of natural and synthetic fabric. The diverse fabrics’ histories, production processes, physical properties, and applications will all be discussed. Additionally, information on fabric maintenance will be provided.
We’ll travel all the way back to the origins of another natural fabric, silk, in this second installment of my series on fabric qualities (the first was about cotton). Silk has been used to make garments and other items for as long as cotton has. In ancient times, silk was the material that distinguished the elite class from the general populace. Silk is still a material that the affluent use frequently nowadays.
History:
According to legend, Empress Si Ling Chi was sipping tea in her palace garden while sitting beneath a mulberry tree. She dropped a silkworm cocoon into her hot tea. She observed as the cocoon’s silk fibers started to separate in the boiling liquid. She gained notoriety as the silk worm goddess.
By the fourteenth century, China had transformed the sluggish process of making silk into a manufacturing industry. The Chinese economy relied heavily on the manufacture of silk, which was used to make bowstrings, fishing lines, and musical instruments. As a reward from the monarchs, silk was also used to compensate the Chinese government’s employees. Additionally, the Chinese traded ilk for Indian-brought spices and diamonds in international trade.
For more than two thousand years, the Chinese preserved their production-secret. It was so well guarded that anyone found guilty of smuggling silkworm eggs, cocoons, or mulberry seeds out of the country faced the death penalty. But by 200 BC, the silk-making secret had reached Korea, and from there it steadily made its way to the rest of Asia and India.
It wasn’t until Persia sent 2000 expert silk weavers to Italy in the 13th century that silk production made it to that country. This encouraged the manufacturing of silk across Europe. China continues to be the world’s top producer of silk today, despite the fact that the industry has expanded globally.
Production procedure:
The silkworm’s innate capacity to create silk fibersustainable clothing and spin its cocoon is the first step in the production of silk. The two main varieties of silkworms are. One of these is the Tussah silkworm, which feeds on oak leaves. Bombaymore, a mulberry silk moth, is the other species that makes silk of the greatest caliber. The mulberry tree’s leaves are the food source for this silkworm. A cocoon made by silkworms typically includes 300–400 meters of silk fiber. Up to 5500 silkworms are required to generate 2 pounds of raw silk fibers.
Sericulture is the process of creating silk thread from a silkworm’s cocoon. On silk farms, sericulture is carried out under carefully monitored circumstances. From their infancy, silk worms are grown and allowed to complete their life cycle. The cocoon stage is when silk may be harvested most successfully.
Characteristics:
Protein fibers like silk are what give silk its unique properties. Despite having a high tensile strength, silk cannot withstand prolonged use or wear. Sunlight makes silk fragile, and excessive alkalinity, acidic, or greasy soils will cause the fibers to break down. The size of the silk yarn used to create the cloth affects how silk looks. Large yarn may give the fabric a more cotton-like or synthetic appearance. The silk fabric will have the silky feel and appearance we expect thanks to small, fine yarn.