Weaving, also known as "shuttle weaving", is the process of combining warp and weft components to make a woven structure. The development of weaving technology has a history of more than 5000 years, which has gone through the stages of original weaving, hand weaving, automatic weaving and shuttleless weaving.
For cashmere industry, weaving is mainly used to make scarves, shawls and blankets. Different yarns such as Nm. 1/15, 2/60, 2/80, 2/120, 2/200 have different style and thickness. With today's technology, we can even make a scarf as thin as several sheets of paper.
Weaving Workshop
Warping
In this step, we only arrange the warp yarns, they must be parallel to each other, and under uniform tension, that is purpose of warping. Yarns in different colors need to be arranged according to patterns, and winding on a reel.
Warp Yarn Arranging (1)
Warp Yarn Arranging (2)
Warp Yarn Arranging (3)
Reed-in
The yarn arranged on the reel goes through the hole in the middle of the shaft. In this way, the arrangement of warp yarns is fixed.
This step needs good eyesight of engineers because the hole is very small, no mistake allowed while ensuring efficiency.
Reed-in
Weaving
Now we can go weaving.
The principle of weaving is not complicated. When warp yarns in odd-numbered and even-numbered move up and down, the weft yarn insert at the same time. In this way, one woven process is complete. Basically, we need to repeat this process about 2500 times for a 180cm length cashmere scarf.
Weaving
Tassels
This is a very interesting step, around 15 years ago, the tassels process is usually done by hand, you can imagine how hard the work is, also, the consistency of the manual work is not good for different productions. Now, we use tassels machine instead of hand work, every tassels follow the same standard.
Tassles
Fabric Inspection
The finished cloth have to be inspected under lights, we will check the measurement based on the technology sheet, also, it's easy to see if there is any defects on the cloth.
Fabric Inspection
Fulling
It involves two procedures, scouring(washing) and milling (thickening)
Fulling
Drying
Drying
Brushing
There are two ways to raise the hair.
First is brushing without water: rotating cylinders which wrapped by steel cloth brush the cashmere fabrics to have fuzz on its surface.
The other is brushing with water: when we see ripple effect on the cashmere scarf, it's caused by a special natural plant which take place of the steel, we call Teaseling for this process, it makes a more luxury surface.
