14/06/2021 Textile Industry Process - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.

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Textile Industry Process

The processes involved in the textile industry are complex, covering every step from ber to nished product.
In this lesson, you'll learn more about the various components of preparing textiles for the marketplace.

The Textile Industry

Have you ever given thought to how that shirt ended up on your back? Not the part where you
traveled to a mall or department store, tried on your preferred size, paid the cashier and
brought it home, but the part before that, where your shirt's 'roots' came from: the spinning,
weaving, dyeing and nishing that went into creating your garment and making it available for
sale in a local store.

The textile industry process is a lengthy one, with many steps to turn raw bers into a useable
product, such as a sweatshirt, bed sheets or bath towels. Let's take a closer look at the process
required to turn bers into nished goods.

The Textile Process

The rst step in the textile process is spinning. This step transforms bers into yarn. Raw bers
like cotton and wool must be spun for making textile products. Years ago, this process used to
be performed by hand, but developments in technology and machinery have created a
machine-controlled process.

The yarn produced by these machines is classi ed as either lament, which are long
continuous strands, or staple, which are short lengths of ber. Filament yarn spinning is an
easier process than staple yarn production, and also cheaper. The various components of the
spinning process include:

Carding: removes impurities from the bers

Combing: straightens the yarn

Drawing: creates evenness in the yarn

Roving: inserts twists into the yarn to hold the bers together

Once the spinning process has completed, it's time to move on to weaving. Weaving dates back
thousands of years and is the practice of interlacing yarns called warp, which runs parallel, and
weft, which runs perpendicular, to build a rigid fabric. Three processes are necessary to
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interlace the two:

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Shedding: separating the warp into two layers

Picking: inserting more yarn while the shed is open

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Beating: pushing the lling yarn into the woven fabric

Weaving machines are identi ed as either shuttle or shuttle-less, which explains their lling
process. A shuttle weaving machine uses a shuttle that goes back and forth across the fabric,
placing the lling yarn. A shuttleless machine can either be projectile, rapier, air-jet or water-jet,
all of which use di erent types of elements to insert lling yarn.

The next step is two-fold and includes dyeing and printing. Textile dyeing gives textiles the
colors and shades that ll our malls and department stores. Dyes contain molecules that absorb
and re ect light to convey various colors.

Dyes can be both natural and synthetic and applied through a variety of methods and at
di erent stages in the manufacturing process. The most common method is direct printing,
which involves pressing dye in a paste form onto fabric in a speci ed pattern.

Printing is another technique to add di erent qualities and patterns to fabrics. It is most
commonly seen in block, roller, screen, heat transfer and ink-jet formats. While most of the
methods involve a dye or pigment being added directly to a fabric, heat transfer uses vapors to
transfer color.

Once you've spun, woven, dyed and printed, it's time for the nishing touches. The nishing
touches are the types of things that normally catch our eye when we're shopping. These
touches can include buttons, zippers, patches and other embellishments that make a textile
more attractive.

Finishing isn't just about making a garment more beautiful, it also incorporates functionality to a
product by adding chemical treatments to make something ame retardant or water repellent,
for example. Finishing can be aesthetic or functional, but the goal is to make the product match
speci cations for how it will be used by consumers.

Lesson Summary
Let's take a few minutes to review what we've learned about the textile process.

The textile industry process is a lengthy and complex one involving di erent spinning
procedures. Spinning produces yarns that are either lament, as in long continuous strands or
staple, as in short lengths of ber. These are used to weave a more rigid fabric.

We also learned that the entire process involves spinning, which transforms bers into yarn,
weaving, which is the practice of interlacing yarns, called warp and weft, dyeing, which gives
textiles the colors and shades, printing, which involves pressing dye in a paste form onto fabric
in a speci ed pattern and nishing, which are the types of things that normally catch our eye
when we're shopping.

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