How It's Made: Woven Cashmere Fabric
Vocab level: C1
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The art of weaving has been around since the Stone Age.
Traditional weavers use techniques and designs that reflect their cultural origins.
Today's fashion industry has built on this tradition to produce fine wool garments.
Designers keep a record of the fabrics they have created over the years.
They pin samples in books based on quality, colors, and patterns for their customers to choose from.
This is what cashmere goat hair looks like when it arrives at the wool mill.
Short fibers called flocks go through a carding machine.
This machine opens up the fibers and mixes colors together.
The carding process removes impurities and reduces the fibers to a flat layer.
The machine combs and twists the layer of fiber in preparation for spinning.
The spinner separates the layer into threads
and winds each one on bobbins of over 40 pounds.
An operator loads yarn into a dyeing machine.
The entire fiber drying process takes about two hours for a reel this size.
Uncarded blocks of hair called wool tops are used to make worsted yarn.
A worker feeds the ribbon-like thread into a blending machine.
The blending process merges 12 threads into one large strip.
The machine re-combs and twists the blended fibers,
then spins them into a single strand.
The coning machine winds the single thread around a cone
by pulling it through a tensioning device with a series of spindles underneath.
This machine can cone 20 pounds of wool in about one hour.
Another spinning machine slowly unwinds worsted wool bobbins.
It accelerates as the threads run through a tensioning device and onto spindles.
Even though the machine processes dozens of bobbins simultaneously,
this process will last several hours.
The set of threads that will make up the woven cloth is called the warp.
Hundreds of parallel threads wind up on this roll called the warping machine.
These rolls can stretch several miles long.
The warp is now ready for weaving.
This shuttle loom holds the warp under tension
while it interweaves the over and under threads using two sets of weaving needles.
This moving part, the beater, keeps the fabric under tension as it comes out of the loom and onto the cloth beam.
This rapier loom can weave fabrics four or five times faster than an automatic shuttle loom
and about 200 times faster than a hand-operated loom.
The completed fabric goes to quality control.
A worker performs a visual check, looking for any defects in the fabric.
If she finds a broken thread, she repairs it by hand.
Using a sewing needle, she replaces the broken thread with a new one.
Once the fabric passes quality control, it goes through a two-hour cleaning process.
Then the cloth rolls through a steaming machine
before accumulating at the end of the production line.
The finishing process for a woven cloth can take up to a week.
Designers study the fabrics and choose arrangements to make a collection.
They mark selected patterns with codes and cut out samples.
Then they make a sample booklet of their fabrics for customers to choose from.
The fabric collection changes twice a year,
providing a wide variety of styles suited to the season.
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