Episode 4 - Concept to Customer Part 2: Material Sourcing
Episode Notes
Heather Zager discusses the second topic in her four-part series called Concept to Customer in this episode. In the first episode she introduced us to design concepting and today she talks about material sourcing. She explains the foundation of fabrics and how they are made, differentiating between natural and man-made fibers as well as how fibers are turned into yarn. Everything from roll size to fabric weight is addressed in this episode to aid in swatch searching.
Natural fibers are either cellulose-based, which comes from a plant, or protein-based, which comes from an animal. Man-made fibers are constructed by humans and they are comprised of two types: manufactured and synthetic. Heather breaks these categories down with examples of which fibers comprise the fabrics we’re used to. She details how they are turned from fibers into yarn, either non-woven, woven, or knit. Each type creates different attributes in the resulting fabric that work best for different types of apparel.
Understanding fabric packaging is the next important piece of material sourcing, so Heather explores rolls, fabric width, fabric length, and weight. Understanding how fabric is measured, what the grain line is, and how it’s weighted will allow for easier swatch selection according to what type of garment will ultimately be made. Heather’s four-part series on the basics of design imparts a foundational understanding of exactly what is required for product development in manufacturing.
About Heather Zager | MADE Apparel Services Founder and Owner
Heather Zager found her calling when she signed up for a beginning pattern making course and realized she had a passion for technical design. She subsequently enrolled in the Apparel Design and Development program at Seattle Central College and graduated two years later with her Associate of Applied Science Degree.
After graduation, she began working with Meta assisting in developing and designing augmented and virtual reality wearable tech gear. In 2020, MADE Apparel Services was born with the idea of helping makers, inventors and designers bring their own sewn product ideas to manufacture. Since then, she has worked with various businesses such as Santa’s Tailor, Feathered Friends, Wolfpack Gear and Classic Accessories, helping them achieve their goals in design, development, pattern making, sewn construction and manufacture.
Today, Heather continues to grow her knowledge and share her experiences with others to bring their visions to reality.
Resources discussed in this episode:
Contact Heather Zager | MADE Apparel Services:
Transcript
Heather Zager: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's podcast. My name is Heather Zager. I am the host of this podcast series and founder of Made Apparel Services. Hi Heather here from Made Apparel Services. Welcome back to my channel. In this episode, which is the second part of a four-part series called Concept to Customer, I am going to talk about sourcing materials for your project. But before you start, just a quick background on why I created this series. Over the last couple of years, when working with my clients, I noticed a consistency in their misunderstanding of four issues or areas of product development in manufacture. Those were Design Concepting, Material Sourcing, Size and Fit, and Types of Manufacturers. This information was creating a lot of confusion and in some cases blocking their progress. But once I explain things in more simplified terms and as smaller steps in relation to a bigger picture, things got much clearer and a lot simpler. So if you're feeling a bit overwhelmed and don't know where to start, I think this series will help you gain some perspective.
Heather Zager: If you are a new designer, sourcing materials can feel overwhelming. However, I've found it's because new designers tend to think a little bit too far into the future as though they are about to go into manufacture, so they're trying to find the perfect material in hundreds of yards from a reputable mill. However, at this early stage, your idea needs development, which means all aspects of the design creation, patterning, sample sewing, and material selection must be explored together. So if one needs to change, the others can quickly follow.
Heather Zager: What we're going to work towards is sourcing swatches and small quantities like five yards. Not only will you get materials faster for testing, but you can easily redirect to another material if you find the one you've chosen is lacking in some way. Small scale or large, though, you should still understand some fundamentals of fabrics to make selection easier. And when you are ready to source larger quantities or work with a supplier, you are much better prepared with the lingo of the industry.
Heather Zager: I am going to first explain the foundation of fabrics and how they are made. So fibers, yarns, and weaves. Then I'm going to talk about fabric packaging, roll size, weights and widths. Once you have the basics, these rows and rows of fabrics you see in-store or page after page if you're online will become a lot less overwhelming. Let's start with fibers. Fibers are the smallest visible part of a fabric, and are best imagined as a single hair-like strand. We call this a staple. While fibers are the foundation of all fabric, there are actually only two types: natural and man-made. Natural fibers are either cellulose-based, which means it comes from a plant, and an example of that is cotton, or protein-based, which comes from an animal. And an example of that is wool. Man-made fibers are just that, they're man-made.
Heather Zager: Man-made fibers also come in two types: manufactured and synthetic. Manufactured man-made fibers use a natural base such as cellulose, protein, or even a mineral such as a glass as its foundation, but it then goes through additional steps to turn it into a fiber. It is essentially a blend of a natural base and then some human ingenuity. Some examples you might be familiar with are modals, lyocels, bamboo, and everyone knows rayon. Another way to think of how a manufactured man-made fiber is created is with an example. If you imagine wheat and you grind it and turn it into flour, that's somewhat of a natural process. But if you then take that flour and turn it into a pancake, then you've manufactured it. It's man-made at this point, but it is using a natural base. And this is what a manufactured man-made fiber is. The other type of man-made fiber is synthetic, which means they're purely chemical-based with no natural anything. These are your nylons, your polyesters, and the very well-known spandex. Now, the thing about fibers is that they are relatively short, like half of an inch to 18in. So they need to undergo a process that turns them into longer lengths called yarn. And yarn is what is used to weave or knit, and thus create the very fabric that you know and love today, and from which your beautiful design will be eventually lovingly cut and sewn. The easiest way to understand how fibers are turned into continuous lengths of yarn is to understand one of man's most basic inventions and how it works: the spinning wheel.
Heather Zager: This cool contraption was invented somewhere between 500 AD and 1000 AD, and it took us a very long time to figure out, but it changed our existence. So much so that we are still using this process today, just obviously through the use of machines and automation. But the spinning wheel will help you conceptualize the basic process of turning fibers into yarn. If you don't know what a spinning wheel is, you can Google it. But essentially it is a contraption that an operator sits at and uses their feet to run pedals that then turn a big wheel, and with a big pile of staple fibers next to them, such as cotton or wool, the operator is taking clumps of the material and hand-teasing the lengths into the spinning wheel where it is then twisted as it's pulled, and this makes that long continuous strand. And the twisting then gives those fibers strength and it integrates them together. Now, once that's created, we can start weaving those yarns into sheets of fabrics. Now, the neat thing about using the spinning wheel as an example to understand how thread is made is that now you can easily relate to how blends are created. That pile of staple fiber next to the operator could be a mix of anything. So that shirt you have, that's 80/20 cotton/poly, came from a pile of staple fibers that we blended together first before being pulled and twisted into a yarn. Of course, the process nowadays is much more complex than this, but you begin to understand the concept of how a yarn is created, how staple fibers are made into these longer lengths that then allow us to weave to make fabric.
Heather Zager: If you'd like to learn more about yarn construction, there is a link in the description to a great article by Thread Science that is really interesting, so you can totally geek out on this if you want to. Now that we know how fibers are made into yarns, we need to understand how they are then made into fabrics. There are only three basic types of fabrics of which you can probably automatically eliminate one, but the three types are woven, knit, and non-woven. We'll start with the one you can probably automatically eliminate, which is the non-woven. And this is probably the least popular one out of all the fabrics anyway. Remember that pile of staple fibers next to the operator at the spinning wheel? Instead of putting it into the spinning wheel, just stomp up and down on it, mash it up and mix it up until it's all evenly flattened out. And you've made a non-woven fabric. A staple fiber that goes directly into a sheet is called felt, and this process is called felting. There's not a lot of garments that are made with felt, so that's why we can eliminate non-wovens. So now we're left with wovens or knits as your two remaining options in your search for fabric swatches. And the only difference in them is the way the yarns are interconnected to make the fabric. Woven fabrics have a grid-like structure of horizontal and vertical lengths of straight yarn that are interlaced together.
Heather Zager: The vertical yarns remain stationary, but the horizontal yarns run back and forth left to right, going over one vertical yarn and then under the next. And that's repeated, going one direction and then turns around and goes back the other direction. And this is done until the vertical space is filled in, eventually creating the sheet of fabric. If you look closely at the fabric weave of a woven, the result is something that looks like a screen. But of course the holes are much, much smaller. You can't see through them. Now knits also have horizontal and vertical lengths, but they are loops rather than straight yarns. They interlock to create a chain-like structure that you can see running horizontally and vertically. As you can imagine, wovens are much stronger and don't stretch very well since the threads are straight and tight. A good example is jeans or a backpack. Since knits have a loop structure both horizontally and vertically, they're much more flexible and stretchier even without spandex blended in. And you see this in t-shirt material, swimsuits, or even socks. There are dozens of ways to weave or knit yarns, maybe hundreds. And they get complicated really fast so I won't go into all of them here. But if you'd like to learn more, I've added a link in the description on types of weaves and types of knits, and this will give you an in-depth explanation of each.
Heather Zager: It's actually very fascinating, but for now, just knowing if your design needs stretch or not will help you determine if you need a woven or a knit. Things like outdoor gear, jeans, and aprons will use wovens, but t-shirts, leisurewear, and workout wear will lean towards using knits. One quick note on wovens and knits. Spandex gives both types more stretch than they otherwise would have had on their own. This is because spandex can be blended into the staple fibers to give an otherwise non-stretchy yarn a lot more give. Use caution, though, because a high spandex blend does get heavy and kind of rubbery.
Heather Zager: Now that you understand how fabric is created, from fibers to yarns to weaves, let's talk about how they are manufactured and sold or basically packaged. There are three important things to look for that aren't really related to the fabric itself. This is width, length, and weight. We'll first talk about width. When a fabric is made, whether it's a woven or a knit, it will have a fixed width. This is measured from factory edge to factory edge. These edges are also known as the selvedge edge, and a good example of this is a roll of toilet paper. The edge on either side is the factory-finished edge. The width doesn't change only the length as you unroll it. In the fabric world you can get different widths, but understanding that width has a limitation depending on the material or the mill from which it's coming is what's important, and I'll explain that in a minute.
Heather Zager: But a few standard roll widths are 42 to 44 inches, 58 to 60. There's even 90 and 120 inches. If you see something that has two numbers like 58/60, it simply means the actual width is 60, but you should avoid a one-inch area at each edge, bringing the usable space down to 58, and so 58 inches becomes the width that you need to work within. So let's go back to why understanding the limitation of the width of fabric is important. In most cases, a pattern piece should only align with the selvage or factory edge of your fabric, and your pattern maker makes this determination on alignment through the use of something called a grain line, and that's marked on your pattern piece. So if you have a pattern piece that is wider than the width of your fabric roll, and your pattern maker won't let you rotate it, which is called going against the grain line, then you will need to use a different material.
Heather Zager: Hopefully it's starting to come into perspective why buying your own material and sourcing a whole bunch of it before you've started developing your project isn't necessarily the best idea. If something doesn't work out like your grain line and your fabric becomes unusable, and that's okay, but you could have put the money into other projects that do make you progress forward. It's also a plug to say, don't skimp on finding a good pattern maker, and even better, find one who will also sew your design. This way, any errors or oversights are almost guaranteed to be caught, so they can quickly be easily corrected. Also, if your fabric has a nuisance behavior, your pattern maker can much more easily advise you on that and recommend any necessary changes to the design or its construction, or even the pattern to make a more perfect product, and this will help keep your costs and headaches low if you can catch all these things early and get that feedback now.
Heather Zager: Okay, so that's enough about width, on to fabric length. Just like the example with the roll of toilet paper, as I mentioned, the length of fabric is the amount that you're rolling off. And in the fabric world it is measured in yards and we call it yardage. Depending on the grain line or the orientation of your pattern pieces, the length can be more or less efficiently used depending on your fabric width. For example, a 58 wide roll will use less yardage for the same pattern than a 42 inch wide roll. So the lesson here is it's really hard to know how many yards you'll need until your pattern is done, so buying only a few yards at a time to test pattern layouts, sewn construction, and overall use of material is really a good idea.
Heather Zager: The last thing I'll talk about is fabric weight. Learning how a fabric is weighed will help you ascertain the behavior of a fabric, even if you aren't holding it. Material is weighed in one of two ways. It's either grams per square meter or ounces per square yard. This all sounds very scientific, but you only need to learn how to relate the number of one of those systems to the fabric behavior and how it feels. For example, let's work with the GSM system. If you order swatches online of various GSMs, or go to a fabric store and look at the labels as you touch and feel fabrics, you'll quickly begin to notice that something like denim is a higher number than something like silk. If you need something denim weight for your project you can then confidently eliminate any weight that's similar to silk. And that's it. The hard part is that one mill might list the weight as GSM on their swatch, but another mill might use ounces per square yard. Fortunately, GSM and ounces per square yard are just a conversion of each other. Like miles versus kilometers. You can just use an online converter, such as textile and fabric weight and conversions to turn one into the other. And I'll put a link to that conversion calculator in the description.
Heather Zager: Now that you understand fibers, yarns, and weaves along with what I like to call fabric packaging when it comes to roll widths, lengths and fabric weights, you should start exploring fabrics. Go to a fabric store and really touch and feel and look at all the different fabrics and read the labels. Feel the difference in the stretch and the weight, and start comparing them to each other in how they behave. And don't forget to compare that technical information on those labels. And if it's still confusing, don't let that stop you from getting swatches. Having something to show your pattern maker or a sourcing expert is the best way to start a conversation. Speaking of sourcing experts, material information can get confusing. Those labels that you're looking at, there's a lot of data on there and some of it is limited, but you just don't know what it is. So the confusing part is that no two suppliers actually list some of this information the same, and they may put some on there and other information not on there. So trying to cross-reference with other brands or types of fabrics can get really complex, really fast. Working with the supplier can be helpful in these cases, but you still need to have some understanding of fabrics and how they're created so that you can answer their questions, and then they can help you find what you're looking for, or point you in the right direction and get you down the right path so it's not so overwhelming. Ultimately, what you want to do is still find swatches and sample yardage. So the materials that you're touching and feeling when you go to the store, you may not understand anything on the label, but if you like the fabric, get some of it and you can share that, like I said, with your pattern maker or with a sourcing expert to find out what it is.
Heather Zager: Hopefully, this podcast is helping you to get to that point. However you decide to start your swatch search, I recommend ordering at least 20 swatches from about 2 to 3 different sources and select as many differing contents, weaves, and weights as you can understand from the label so that you have a variety of things to experience. Some will surprise you and others will be disappointing, but you will quickly figure out what you like and don't like. Don't forget, this could take some time, and you might have to order another round of swatches and it can start to get frustrating, but keep going forward. Start your swatch search early and work with your pattern maker or that sourcing expert so they can better align the development of your project with your design intentions.
Heather Zager: One last thing before you head out to find swatches. I want to touch on something called deadstock fabrics. These are essentially leftovers or surplus from a fashion brand or textile mills production process due to overproduction, sometimes quality issues, or even small flaws. Some will argue against using deadstock because it isn't replenishable. Once it's gone, it's gone and you'll be back to sourcing material anyway. It also tends to have those flaws or have quality issues, so that can poorly reflect on your brand, even at a small batch level. So these are just some things to consider as you look at deadstock fabric. On the other hand, there is a trending argument for its use, simply because these fabrics would otherwise end up in our landfills and the earth-friendly movement is a strong one. So my personal opinion is that material selection should not stall the development of your concept, and thus getting your brand to market. Your first batch is about doing only a few hundred pieces to see if you can get market traction. If anybody's even interested in your brand and what you're creating. If you do and you are going into a second production run, then you can start perfecting everything, including material sourcing. Until then, if you need to work with deadstock to keep the pattern-making and sampling development process moving forward, then do it. A good pattern maker will throw a flag if they get to a point they can't confidently work on your project or are having problems with your fabric selection. They'll let you know. And that's it.
Heather Zager: Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel or follow me on social media, because I do post regularly and I want to make sure you catch the latest. If you have any questions or suggestions for future podcasts or anything specific to this particular podcast, my email is in the description, so please let me know. All right, have fun with your swatch search.