The McLellan Experience: Fabric mill visit...

It's taken me a couple of days to catch up on this post since it's a long one but I hope you find it very interesting. I got to go on a fabric mill visit with my manager and one of our Material Research Analysts. I love all the geeky parts of my job...love the science behind the perfect snap, anything zipper related, a great elastic and now I will always be fascinated with each fabric that gets developed for my styles. This all happened last Thursday with a 1 1/2 hr drive west from Shanghai...we pulled up at the Mill gates and saw what looked like a forest ahead of us. This is a rare thing in the parts of China that I have seen, especially for the campus of such an industrial company. What I found out later is that they are trying to offset part of their carbon footprint and be responsible citizens so they are planting as many trees on their property as possible (along with some other great plant-saving steps!).

Check out the trees!

Ok, now we get into the fun stuff...

how is a synthetic fabric made?!?!

So the first part of our tour started in the warehouse where they store the yarn to be used for different fabrics. These yarns, polyesters and nylons, have to be ordered in such a way that they are in the fabric making process within 3 months or the yarn on it's own starts to degrade or go bad, if you will. Check out the large white spools in the above pictures, that is all polyester yard of different thicknesses to be used for orders that they have received.

Then we moved the initial steps in the weaving process

All the those giant spools from the warehouse get set up on this grid. In the initial
part of the weaving process a couple hundred of these spools are being moved to
one giant spool called a Beam. The Beaming process can be seen below.

Beaming

Can you see all the yarns leading from the grid of spools to the machine on the left?

My first view of this beaming process was from the front the of the machine that you see on the left in the picture above (or the exact view that you see from the video below). From that view I could not see all the yarns leading form the spools and even when I moved to the side I still did not notice the yarns until they were pointed out to me...I was amazed, they were almost invisible. You could definitely get yourself into a mess by walking unknowingly to the back of this beaming machine. Now imagine that a worker has to set up each individual yarn on this machine and has to maintain that each yarn stays in it's place.

It's hard to see how fast this machine is working but it is a fairly quick process so each worker on one of these has to keep a close eye to make sure that the yarns don't get tangle. If it does happen they have to stop the machine and make the fix right away. This happened about 3 times within the 5 minutes that I watched the process.

You can see the arm of a worker as she is fixing the position
of one of the yarns that has strayed to the wrong position

After the beam is filled it is moved to the first of two different sizings that happen. The sizing process stabilizes the yarns for sthickness and strength and prepares the yarns to move to the next step. The yarns run through a specific wet chemical compound then are sent immediately into a long drier then spun back onto another bean at the other end of the room. The machine for the sizing was about 30 feet long. The steam in the picture above on the right is from wet yarns moving in to the hot drier environment.

After the yarns are sized, multiple beams are then combined together, which you can see above (10 beams being moved to one beam). It is my understanding that the number of beams that are combined depends on the end desire of the fabric...how heavy or dense is the desired fabric?!

Here you can see the empty beam that is about to be filled with the
yarn from the 10 beams you saw in the previous picture. Again, the
worker have to make sure the yarn stay in order and don't get tangled,
they have to stop the machine and fix the yarn one becomes out of place

Then this filled beam is set up on a thread counter and it does exactly as the name hints...counts the number of yarns. This is a slow process due to the number of yarns on each beam. Along with the counting the threads they are being prepared for the next step by being separated into 2 groups (this is done by grouping every other yarn together).

Then the yarns are set up to be threaded and to create the particular weave that is desired in the end fabric. Below, you can see how the 2 different groups, that were separated during the counting process, are set up on this machine.

Below videos show how the worker has to grab the blue threaders is a certain order, this is how she is creating the pattern. The next video shows how quickly the worker is trained to thread each yarn. If she accidentally thread the wrong blue threader this would create a flaw in the finished fabric.

Finally, the beamed yarns are ready to be weaved

Check out all the weaving machines. All the ones that I could see where in use and the factory said they have over 80 weavers. These were not quiet machines either and was given earplugs to enter the room b/c of the loud noise. Above right, shows the spool of yarn that is used as the weft yarn in the fabric.

The first view in this video shows the weaving machine from the back before the weft yarn is inserted, then the video moves to the front of the machine where the weaved fabric is rolled back onto a beam.

I was just amazed with how many of these weaving machines were at work.

Here's a view of all the weaving machines at work.

Sorry, this is a short video but it shows an up-close view.

More trees! And you can see the tower for the water treatment plant next store.
The mill treats all it's water and tries to reuse what it can.

The second sizing process

This picture is a little dark but it shows the contraption that the weaved fabric goes through in the second sizing of the weaving process. The fabric is sized with chemicals to stabilize the yarns and fabric as a whole before it goes into the dying process.

This is the fabric sizing machine...it's HUGE!

Left, first dying method called "piece dying" where the fabric is left on the beam and water, dye stuff and pressure are used to dye the entire lot of fabric. Right, is second type of dying where the fabric transferred from one beam to a second beam being introduced to dye stuff in between.

Above is the third type of dying and this one has the best results and is done at the highest temperatures. These dye baths were about 25 feet long and very efficient (but the most costly of the three options).

A QC check for color. Matching sure it matches the customers order request.

This fabric just happens to be white, though.

Finishing the fabric

This is where the fabric receives any desired treatments like wicking, DWR or anti-wrinkle. This process can even make a fabric shinier if it is put through hot rollers at high pressure...think of fabric being used on down jackets, that shine is added at the end of the fabric making process.