Crash course week started with a lecture about textile materials in which we found out what is actually a textile material, what are it's components, where can it be used and what types of textile materials do we have.
Our first questions was to think about where can we find textile materials if we look around. Textile materials can be found almost everywhere today - we have them in our closets, houses, bedrooms, garages (cars), we also use them in healthcare, for plant growth protetcion and even for building roads... That led us to a question - what can be called a textile material?
Textile material is a structure consisted of yarns / fibers and textile fibers are the smallest component of every single textile material. For something to be called a fiber it has to gave it's length equal to it's width x 100. Fibers can be natural ( plants, animals...) or man-made and they can also be made directly into fabrics or spun into a yarn. Here is a picture of how we divide fibers according to their origin :
To be able to make a form suitable for weaving, knitting or some other procees that results with textile material, we have to continuously strand fibers, filaments ( silk for example) and materials into something called a yarn. After we have a yarn, we can make a textile material that can be woven, knitted or non-woven. then our textile material usually goes through one or more finishing processes (bleaching, mercerising, coloration, yarn slashing etc.) and finally becomes a product.
Natural fibers
Besides that cotton grows on bushes and that fibers grow from the seeds, we found out that cotton as a plant requiers a lot of sunshine and water, can be harvested by hand or machines and is categorized and graded by maturity, purity, color and lenght. We also had a chance to see how does cotton look before fibers are taken out and also fabrics made of it :
One of the most interesting things I found out during this lecture was connected to bast fibers. The most well known representative is flax fiber and from 100 kg of stems you get around 4 kg of flax fibers. Flax also has a very interesting texture and it is very easy to recognise it under the microscope - it looks like a lot of small sticks sticked together.
When we talked about wool, we mentioned a wool classification according to its lenght (fine, medium, coarse) and also about very developed grading system. We also mentioned few interesting differences between a human hair and wool - wool is elastic, crimped and it grows in staples.
One of the rare natural filament fibers - silk, was a very interesting subject because the process of producing this fiber is really amazing. Silkworms produce continuous fibers by glandular secretion into a form of a cocoon which is later picked up and unwrapped into a filament fiber. Slik has a triangular cross section with rounded edges and that is what gives such a beautiful shine and finess to it.
Man-made fibers
If we make a fiber with linear density of less than 1 dtex, we made a microfiber which can be made into a product such as towel, mop, cleaning cloth, pads etc.
After learning a bit about fibers, we came back to yarns and talked about structures, textures and consistancy of yarns. A yarn can have different number of strands (single, ply, cord...), a filament yarn is divided by the number of filaments (monofilament, multifilament) and a yarn can also be twisted in S or Z direction. Yarns can have different textures such as coils, curls, high bulks and so on.
There are many newer ways of using textile materials today, for example in medicine as implants which was very interesting to learn about because it gives a completely new perspective about fibers and makes us think outside the box when it gets to creating smart/inteligent textiles and fibers.