Fiber & Biopolymer Research Institute Visit #1

Fiber cleaner

            It’s hard to know what to expect when you have never been to fiber laboratory before. In fact, I have never given much thought to how fabrics are made, only how beautiful or not beautiful they are. My very first thought when walking into the research institute was “wow those machines are large.” It was amazing to learn what each of those large machines did and what they can produce.

            The room in the tour was full of big machines that cleaned the wool. The number of cleaning steps the wool must go through to be passed into the other room depends on how dirty the wool is in the first place. We were able to see a chunk of fiber that most would be timid to touch turn into a cotton-like material that you would want to sleep on. The actual machine used to do this reminded me of the “stuffer” used at Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Spun into storage

            Once the fibers are completely cleaned, they are transported into a different room by machine. This is an even larger room with many machines that do tedious work. After turning the fibers into extremely thin soft sheets, they take it to a different machine that turns the sheets into long string-like forms and spin them up for storage.

            After these steps there are many different things that they are able to do with the fibers and each had its own process. We were able to see how the process is much longer to make cashmere than it would be to make a simple cotton jean material. We also learned fabrics such as cashmere are more expensive not only because of the process, but also because of how much waste is created to achieve the flawless finished product.

Weave template

            One thing in particular that was very interesting was how they are able to achieve different weaves with the same machine. They do this by using a template with rows of holes punched into it. These holes are able to lead the machine in the correct direction for that particular weave. Instead of moving to a different machine to do another weave, they simply switch out the template instead.

            The process of creating these fabrics is way more complex than I could ever understand, but learning a little about it helps me appreciate the differences in the clothes that I wear and the couch that I sit on.