Blog Post #3 All About Looks

This was an amazing experience. All About Looks is a store located here in Lubbock. The people we met there were truly wonderful and helpful. They taught us many valuable things about fabric. One things that they spoke about were the current trends in interior fabrics. Linen is huge right now.  It has been popular in the past but is now making a comeback. As well as mohair, silk, jute/burlap, bamboo and wool have been extremely popular lately. The most interesting of the fabrics is definitely is the jute/burlap. One of the examples the showed us was   a beautiful burlap made by Ralph Lauren which had a high, high cost. The showed us another example of burlap which was only a mere $4 per yard.

One extremely important lesson that they taught us was the difference between ordering faux leather and real leather.  We learned that faux leather you order by the yard while real leather you order by the hide.  This may seem like common sense to some people but in reality I understand how people can confuse this fact.

Another great factor about All About Looks was that they had a man who’s trade was reupholstering fabric. They explained to us that this was a dying trade. The reupholstering was definitely the most interesting thing. They showed us different fillings for the seat, cushions, headboards, etc. They also explained how they measure the fabric for reupholstering.

Blog Post # 2 Field Tripppppppppppppp!!!!! My lovely Experience at The Fiber & Biopolymer Research Institute

The Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute located in Lubbock, Texas is an extraordinary place. It just has too much for just one day. The first day was jammed packed and had so many interesting things that truly will open one’s eyes to see the process that people go through just to turn cotton into yarn.  The second day was definitely the most interesting though.  It had different machines that they used to test the strength of a fabric and how much a fabric pills.  

The most interesting machine was definitely the machine that testes the Breaking Force and Elongation of Textile Fabrics. The machine used cut strip samples and two claws to test the fabrics.  The two claws then pulled part until the fabric broke, taking the measurements and recording them to compare to other results to verify their strength.

Another Machine at The Fiber & Biopolymer Research Institute was the Random Tumble Pilling Tester. This test causes pills (small rolls of fabric that come out of the weave) to form on the fabric by a random rubbing action produced by tumbling specimens in a test chamber.  This process imitates the wear and tear that fabrics go through on a day to day basis. Not all fabrics pill the same. In fact there is a scale of 1 to 5 determining the level of pilling that the fabric displays. If a fabric is rated a 1 it has very severe pilling. If a fabric is rated a 2, it has severe pilling. If it is rated 3, the fabric has moderate pilling. If it rated a 4 on the scale of pilling, it has slight pilling. And last but not least if the fabric has a rating of 5 it has no pills at all.

The third and an extremely important test that the Institute uses to see how much a fabric shrinks or stretches in the washing process. The Institute employees use a small piece of fabric and mark four dots on it. After they mark the dots they use a specialized computer to measure how far apart the dots are. They then wash it is a specialized washing machine and let it dry in a set temperature and humidity. After this process, the fabric is out back under the machine to measure how far apart the dots are then. The difference is compared is shown by the percentage that it shrank.

Blog Post #1 Fibers

Cotton is now being used for more and more materials that we use in our everyday lives. This fiber can be traced back to Egypt in 12,000 B.C. which means that it has been used for at least 7,000 years. It has been used for everything from bed sheets to money. Little do people know that even the money we use daily is a blend between cotton and linen. But even that is not the biggest surprise cotton has to offer.  

Cotton is a crop that is grown across the United States and it is grown in 17 states from the East Coast to the West Coast. Fields of cotton cover over 12 million acres in the United States which equals over 7.2 billion pounds of product each year. Even though the United States is not the largest supplier of cotton, it is the largest exporter.  All of this cotton helps leads to an estimated 120 billion dollars of revenue every year.[1]

Most fibers today have to be mixed with another fiber to make a stronger, better material that can withstand daily use. Cotton is no exception. The most common use for cotton is clothes, which makes up sixty-four percent (64%) of the cotton used. The second most common use is for home furnishings which make up twenty-eight percent (28%), there are so many different fibers that can be used to be mixed with cotton. For one example, like mentioned earlier, is money. Money is a mix of 75% cotton and 25% linen. There are many more things made up with a mix of cotton but listing all the examples would take days!

Overall, cotton is a very useful fiber that is used constantly in our everyday lives. Even though many people do not realize it, cotton affects us in everything people do. It is an important fiber that is a natural resource that helps keeps thousands of people working and helps the economy tremendously. 

Sources Used

http://www.cottoninc.com/AboutCotton/How-Cotton-Is-Used/?S=AboutCotton&Sort=0

http://www.cotton.org/econ/world/index.cfm

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[1] http://www.cottoninc.com/AboutCotton/How-Cotton-Is-Used/?S=AboutCotton&Sort=0