| Textile manufacturing is one of the oldest of man's technologies. The oldest known textiles date back to about 5000 B.C. In order to make textiles, the first requirement is a source of fibre from which a yarn can be made, primarily by spinning. The yarn is processed by knitting or weaving, which turns yarn into cloth. The machine used for weaving is the loom. For decoration, the process of colouring yarn or the finished material is dyeing.
Typical textile processing includes 4 stages: yarn formation, fabric formation, wet processing, and fabrication.
The three main types of fibers include natural vegetable fibers (such as cotton, linen, jute and hemp), man-made fibers (those made artificially, but from natural raw materials such as rayon, acetate, Modal, cupro, and the more recently developed Lyocell), synthetic fibers (a subset of man-made fibers, which are based on synthetic chemicals rather than arising from natural chemicals by a purely physical process) and protein based fibers (such as wool, silk, and angora).
|
