Why fabric is important for the garment manufacturer

It's obvious that Fabric is the main raw material for garment making. It's is more important due to two reasons.

• In a garment approximately 90% of total contains the fabric.

• From the total cost of a garment, approximately 60% goes for the fabric cost, that means the half of the turn over is spent

Thus, selecting a reliable fabric supplier, select the most appropriate  fabrics and bringing them down are very critical.

When selecting a fabric for a design several factors should be considered.

• Appropriateness of the fabric in terms of drape, hand feel and construction.
• Fabric properties such as moisture absorbency, Thermal properties and tenacity
• Fabric sew-ability
• Fabric durability and serviceability such as laundry-ability etc
• Ability to pass the fabric  tests. (ex : Shrinkage, color fastness etc)

Analysis of Complete Inspection Process

I have summarized the whole fabric inspection process to get a clear idea. The inspection process starts upon the receipt of fabric rolls or batches  for bulk production. The sequence of the process is common to all the Sri Lankan garment manufacturers yet the way they perform these steps can be varied from one to another.

However, the process that have to be performed when a defected fabric is detected is not included here.
I will explain it in my next blog post !

Visual Inspection and Grading Systems

Evaluation of fabric quality is a complex process for both the fabric supplier and the garment manufacturer.
The garment manufacturer's process of determining the quality of  a particular fabric is called 'fabric inspection process'. Fabric Inspection process can be divided into three sub processes.

Visual Inspection

Visual inspection can be done manually or with  full automated machines. Unfortunately in Sri Lanka, manual inspection method is often used in most of the garment factories. Often the garment manufacturer receive fabrics in roll form. Randomly chosen fabric rolls (10% from total rolls ) are fixed into the fabric inspection machine. The fabric inspector checks for fabric defects and note them manually to offer points.

( manual fabric inspection )

Fabric Grading Systems

Once the fabric defects are detected each defects are given points depending on the severity. Offering points is a part of grading system to assess the quality of the fabric. There are several grading systems available such as 4 - point system, 10 point system, 9 points system, Graniteville system etc.

we shall discuss the grading system in detail.

4 - Point system

 Published in 1959

 Also called the American Apparel Manufacturers Association (AAMA) point grading system

 The maximum number of defect points to be counted against any one linear yard is 4 points

Defect Counting - 4 point system

Fabric Grading according to 4 - point system

10 point system

• published in 1955 by Textile Distributors Institute and National Federation of Textile
• Designed to consider every defect  according to the size regardless of type
• mostly used for woven fabrics

The 4 - point system is frequently used for fabric grading in Sri Lanka but there is no standard industry-wise system for grading fabrics. When the order is placed the buyer or the merchandiser should specify in the contract the evaluation method to be used for grading fabrics.

Analysis of quality plan and documentation of fabric inspection.

4.1.2      

During the inspection process, different documents/reports are needed at different stages to record inspection results. Almost all of them are manually updated. ( please note that, this analysis based on Sri Lankan Garment Industry )

Fabric Defect Visualization !

well let's identify fabric defects. below chart will provide you a summery of fabric defects including both knit fabric defects and woven fabric defects.

fabric defects classificaion

well finding a fabric without defects is really difficult. it's like you are going to find a perfect man or woman to marry... however these defects can make a fabric lower in quality and ultimately it will be another wasted product.

fabric defects can be categorized mainly as below

this classification can be used to decide the severity of the defects but there can be other classifications too.

for an example I made below classification considering how the defect occur

there are  more to say about defetcs.... wait for the next pages !!!!