Quick little rant about fiber type.
In the USA, we have something called the Textile Products Identification Act, which, among other things, prevents manufacturers selling fake fur as real fur, polyester as silk, and requires mattresses and pillows to be sold with the UNDER PENALTY OF LAW THIS TAG IS NOT TO BE REMOVED EXCEPT BY THE CONSUMER tag. (BTW, you can rip the tag off. The police won’t come. You’re the consumer. You’re allowed to).
When you buy fabric, the end of the bolt will say what the fiber content is. It will tell you if a product is acrylic or Modal or 100% cotton. They don’t say this because they think it’s helpful to the people buying it. They say this because they’re required to by law.
Here’s where I’m going to piss people off: fiber type does not actually matter a whole lot in terms of what the final fabric will be like.
Let’s use cotton as an example. Here’s some random 100% cotton stuff I found around my house:
This is a several-year-old cotton dish cloth, a terry towel, and a pair of jeans. There are all 100% cotton. These are all also completely unsuitable for lolita.
100% cotton denim looks like denim because of the way it’s woven. The lengthwise threads are thin and white, and the crosswise threads are thicker and blue. It’s woven in a twill weave, which adds strength and allows it to move more freely. 100% cotton terry is woven so that some of the threads stick up and make little loops, which makes it sort of fuzzy and allows it to absorb more water than denim. This is why we don’t use denim as towels. The 100% cotton dish cloth isn’t woven at all. It’s knitted, and the knit and purl stitches that it’s knitted with form the basket weave pattern. If you’re wearing a t-shirt right now, you’re probably also wearing knitted 100% cotton, but it looks and behaves in a very different way from the dish cloth, because it’ll be knitted with very small threads (and the dish cloth is made from very small threads twisted into larger threads which are then twisted into a larger thread).
Aaaaaaaand here’s the thing: cotton fibers are grown. Until we decide to use CRISPR on textiles, cotton fibers will largely be the same length and diameter. We can’t make them longer and we can’t make them thinner or fatter, except by selectively breeding the cotton over many years. All natural fibers are more or less like this. Merino wool has different properties because it comes from merino breed of sheep, who are bred to be soft, and Leicester sheep are bred to have really long fibers, but you’re still limited to whatever nature will create.
Natural fibers are limited to certain characteristics, but they can create drastically different kinds of fabrics.
So get ready for *dramatic music* manufactured fibers.
To simplify the process, polyester fibers are made by melting plastic and then spraying the molten plastic out of a tiny shower head. This makes strings of plastic that are roughly the thickness of hairs, which are then used to make threads in the same way cotton and wool will make thread.
With polyester fibers, the manufacturing process controls how big the hair’s cross-section is (thick ones can be used for cheap carpet and tiny ones are made into microfiber cleaning cloths, for examples), what shape the cross-section is, how long the fibers are, if they’re dyed or if they’re created with a color that can’t be changed, and more. Once the fibers are created, they can be twisted and spun and woven and knitted in all the various ways that cotton fibers can, to make MORE changes that affect the final fabric.
Here’s a picture of two kinds of acrylic, knitted with exactly the same number of stitches per inch and the same tension.
The only differences are the length of the fiber (the shiny one has long fibers) and ply (how many smaller yarns are twisted to make one. The shiny has one ply and the matte has 3). (Please excuse the ugly upholstery). Two different fabrics, same fiber type.
So here’s the thing: 100% wool felt and 100% polyester felt will be more like each other than 100% polyester felt is like 100% polyester organza.
Because it’s labeled on every textile we buy, it’s easy to assume that fiber type is the most important thing when choosing a textile. That’s just flat not true. There’s a lot of people who say they don’t like or can’t wear a certain fiber, but who actually can’t wear a certain application of that fiber, and would be fine with other ways that fiber is used. I see this a lot at work, with “I’m allergic to acrylic, but not acrylic fake fur or velvet.”
That said, you do not have to like things you don’t like. If something makes you uncomfortable, or you don’t like touching it, or you don’t like how it looks, or you woke up one morning and decided that everything brown was terrible, you don’t have to like it. You don’t need to justify your preferences to anyone. If someone tells you that you probably don’t have what medically classifies as an allergy to acrylic, tell them to get frilled, because you don’t have to like things that make you uncomfortable just because science hasn’t yet progressed to being able to you psychically beaming to someone the uncomfortable feeling you get when you touch something.
This is all a very long way of saying two things: 1) When you’re buying fabric online, make sure that you know more about it than just its fiber type. Pictures are your friend here. and
2) please stop using “merino wool” to mean “arm knitting yarn,” especially in troom-troom DIY or inthekno-type videos, because it’s very confusing to craft store workers who are trained to take you to the size 1 sock yarn when you ask for merino.
(ALSO merino roving is NOT the best wool for arm knitting. My favorites are tencel for washability, Leicester for fiber length (which relates to durability), Jacob Grey if I want something all natural looking, and Premier Yarns Couture Jazz if I want something I can buy at a physical store (hold two strands as one if you’re arm knitting, knits great single strand on us50 needles), not that anyone asked)
