Fabrics for Beginners (An Evolving Reference)

Do you feel lost when you start reading about fabric? Yeah, me too.

I’m thinking I should start this post-that-shall-be-continually-revised as I discover more and more about fabrics, and maybe we’ll end up with a comprehensive reference to turn to when we start getting lost in the woods.

So right now, I don’t know a whole lot: the sum of my knowledge pretty much falls into these two categories which describe how the fabric is constructed, not what it’s made of:

Thanks to my book for this ripped-off visual.

Wovens

• Literally, think about weaving. I feel like most of us have encountered some sort of art project as kids where we wove some yarn or twigs or paper together. That’s woven fabric. I want to say woven fabrics typically don’t stretch, but I feel like there’s probably exceptions to that which I haven’t discovered yet.

A 2nd ripped-off visual. Thanks, book.

Knits

• Right now, I qualify knits as “stretchy!” Literally, when I’m in the store looking at fabric, I tug on it, and if it stretches, I think “That’s a knit!”

And thus it gets muddied…

If only it were as easy as knit vs. woven.

Sorry, it isn’t.

There is all kinds of more to pile on top of that simplistic classification, like

• fabric weight which can be measured in metric units (GMS) or imperial units (oz)
• the direction(knits)/grain(wovens) of a fabric (yep, two different terms talking about the same concept depending on if it’s a knit or woven)
• drape
• synthetic vs. natural
• woven patterns vs. printed patterns and all the terms that go along with that

And I don’t even know what else yet, but I feel like a lot of my confusion comes from the overlap of a lot of these things and multiple terms to define the same thing.  Like I’ve mostly been using quilting cotton which is a woven, but cotton can also be a knit, or part of a synthetic blend called “jersey”… And then you start piling weight on top of all of this and I pretty much don’t know anything. I just want a chart I can look at and cross-reference so when I find some fabric in the store that’s unhelpfully labeled, I can look at my chart and figure out if it’s considered light-, medium-, or heavyweight, if it’s a knit or…whatever else. I mean, just look at all this. Hasn’t someone organized all this crap in logical way, yet?

Perhaps I ask for too much, what with the vast landscape of fabrics to behold.

Or perhaps I’ve found a project well-suited to a graphic designer who is learning about sewing and fabrics. Sounds like a job for…well, me.