All About Man-Made Fabrics, Now in Cartoon Form!

Welcome to another edition of Saturday School, except it's on a Friday! This week in textiles class we learned about the manufacture of man-made fabrics, both transitional (cellulose-based, but processed, e.g. rayon) and synthetic (the more stereotypical artificial fibers, like polyester and nylon). Maybe you already know about how they squirt dope (that's really what they call it!) through shower heads (that's not what they call them, but that's what they look like to me), but I bet you've never seen the properties of man-made fibers illustrated with the help of cats! Seriously, adding doodles to my notes is the only way I'm going to stay awake through a 3+ hour night class at the end of a long workday.

Man-made fibers get generic names from the Federal Trade Commission based on whether they exhibit significantly different chemical composition with specific performance characteristics. So spandex is the generic term (like tissue), but Lycra is the trade name (like Kleenex). Depending on whether the source is natural (cellulose-based, like rayon) or not (plastic-based, like polyester), the liquid solution, aka dope, is prepared indifferent ways (Step 1). The dope then gets pumped through the shower-head-thingy, or spinneret, into long filament fibers that can be thousands of meters long (Step 2). Lastly, the fibers are solidified (Step 3), and some will also be stretched so that the fibers are all lined up nicely (Step 4). 

Parent fibers, are like version 1.0...no mods to the chemical solution, generic round (and therefore hideously shiny and dirt magnifying) cross-section. Second generation fibers can have improvements (it's like when Squirtle evolves into Wartortle), whether through adding things to the chemical make-up (dyes, delusterants to get a more refined shine) or changing the extrusion rate or modding the fiber afterward. That's when polyesters moved away from the hideous stuff of the 70s and more toward the high-quality fabrics used now to make poly-taffeta that's nearly indistinguishable from real silk. The third generation fibers have even cooler mods (Blastoise!), such as when biconstituent fibers combine two different kinds of dope with different properties. For example, flame-retardant fabrics can contain a suspension of flame-retardant fibers in a matrix of softer, cottony-feeling fiber, thereby making a fabric that feels nice to wear, but won't go up in flames. Our prof likened it to chocolate chips suspended in Jello.

I think I might be the only one in the class who wants to protest each time the professor says "...but I won't go into more detail about the science of it." When going over the study guide for the midterm, I asked how much detail she wanted us to know about what causes wrinkling in cotton, and all she wants is for us to be able to say that cotton fibers don't have good resilience. The science teacher in me is all !?!A@?$& BUT THAT DOESN'T ACTUALLY EXPLAIN ANYTHING, but I have to keep reminding myself that this isn't a science class, and most people in the room aren't science-types...

Would anyone actually be interested in a little video blurb on wrinkling and fiber chemistry? I'm thinking of making one because I just think it's so cool!

Walnut demonstrates the stretching process...but I don't think he got any stronger as a result.