lesson
Updated 6 days ago · 1 view
Look at the care tag on your favorite hoodie: it might say 60% cotton, 40% polyester. One half grew in a sunlit field, while the other began as crude oil inside a chemical refinery.
Every textile begins as a fiber — a hair-like strand with a length at least one hundred times greater than its diameter, capable of being spun into yarn.
How do textile scientists organize hundreds of different fibers into a system that makes sense?
The Fiber Classification Tree
We classify all textile fibers into three distinct groups based on their raw material source and the chemical processing required to form them.
📊Interactive diagram
What makes a fiber that grows straight out of the ground distinct from one sheared from an animal?
Natural Fibers
Natural fibers occur ready-made in nature and are harvested directly from plants or animals without altering their core molecular polymer chain.
Plant-based fibers are built from cellulose (a rigid, absorbent plant carbohydrate found in cotton seed bolls and flax stems), whereas animal fibers are built from protein chains (such as keratin in sheep's wool and fibroin in cultivated silk).
📊Interactive diagram
What happens if we take raw plant cellulose, dissolve it into a liquid paste, and squirt it through tiny holes to make a brand-new strand?