Fabrics for Dummies

Well another exciting week has passed and another is about to start. Buying Hawaiian fabrics is a weekly task around here, but just this weekend I concluded that a lot of people couldn’t tell one fabric from another. So that poses an interesting question, just how do you tell what is what?

Our area of expertise is primarily all fabrics Hawaiian, which include cotton, cotton blends, polycotton and rayon fabrics. Cotton is obviously made from Cotton fibers and it’s probably the most popular and comfortable fabric for apparel. Polycotton is pretty popular because of its durability and wide array of designs available on polycotton.

Rayon fabrics are made from natural wood fibers and are probably the most underrated of all the fabrics, I think people confuse them with the polyester shirts back in the days of disco shirts. Shirts made from polyester are not bad, after all they do hold color forever but there is that stigmatism… one that the fabric may never shake off. Remember when bakelite was all the rage?

But if you were holding them in your hand would you really be able to tell what’s what? Believe it or not many of the fabric sellers cant either. So I developed a simple yet reasonably accurate way to tell, you will need a small piece of the fabric and a lighter or similar source of flame.

Take a small piece of fabric in question and light one corner of it, allow it to burn for about a second or two (observe the smoke and color of the flame) and then blow it out. Then take a look at the edge of the fabric where the flame was.

Cotton: Burns without any distortion of fabric, the fire line is very clean and even.

Rayon: Burns much faster and resembles burning paper, the burnt fiber will feel like fine ash.

Polycotton: Somewhat smoky burn, the fabric will curl while burning and the fire line will have a shiny edge to it.

Polyester: Noticeably more smoke than other fabrics and the fire line will look just like melted plastic.