Spot The Difference 12.08.26

I'm at our viscose printing factory + I'm going to talk you through some of the printing processes that our fabrics go through.

First, the viscose goes through these digital printing machines. What started as plain fabric ends up with our scarlet polka dot pattern. After the printing is finished, the fabric feels super crunchy.

Now this machinest sews our printed fabric onto a starter base, which will make it easier for our fabric to thread through the machine. This one here...

Here's our fabric!

Now the fabric gets washed to remove any excess dye. It is then dried to remove even more shrinkage + make the fabric more stable.

The fabric then gets washed again to soften it up, resulting in a really beautiful drape.

The fabric has had its little bath in here + now it's being spun.

I'm racing to catch up with it ~ it's just come out of the dryer.

We've driven for about an hour to our CMT factory. We are doing a bit of a science experiment to work out how we can press the fabric without using steam so the fabric doesn't stretch when it's being made into garments. The reason we don't want it to stretch when it's being made into garments is that when it is then washed, it will go back to its natural size or natural form, which means the garment shrinks.

So, we have taken two garments using the same fabric as we did our test printing today. The top one, we used no steam to press it. The bottom one we used steam. As you can see, the bottom one is much longer. So the bottom one kind of grows artificially with the steam. This then means when it's washed, it feels like it is shrinking, but really it's just returning to its natural length

For more information on materials + manufacturing, you can visit our Toolbox page here.