Another Exciting Innovation for Textile Students

We've all heard this dreadful sound at one time or another – the rip of a seam in our clothes when we sit down, turn the wrong way, or get caught on a sharp corner. Some fabrics just seem doomed to a short life, ending after their first or second wash. Then you have your favorite skirt or pair of jeans that lasts years without as much as a tiny hole! Do you ever wonder how the fabric your clothes are made of gets performance-tested? Analyzing a fabric's performance is a pivotal part of the overall textile design process. It's important to know how new fabric will respond to the normal wear and tear of everyday use. To help students in the Advanced Textile Design Program learn how it's done, FIDM recently opened an in-house, state-of-the-art textile-testing laboratory.

Read on as Erika Willhite, FIDM's Textile Laboratory Coordinator, explains the new technology.

The new facility is housed in our Los Angeles loft campus. The lab contains eight pieces of industrial testing equipment that are used to guarantee that fabrics and fibers meet specific commercial test standards. These standards are set by organizations that conduct tons of research, development, investigations, and comparisons of fabric samples to ensure that consumers know exactly what properties are associated with a particular fabric. The two main organizations that set the textile standards are The American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC) and The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). Here are the machines that show students how to perform tests and what their unique functions are:

1. Universal Tensile Tester - Used to break items such as a shirt or a pair of pants in order to determine the amount of strength, stretch, or elongation the product has.

2. Elmendorf Tearing Tester - This machine is a staple in most textile-testing laboratories. It is used to determine how resistant a fabric is to tearing.

3. Corckmeter - Tests the resistance of a fabric due to color transfer from rubbing. In other words, it tests the amount of dye that is transferred from one product to another when they come in contact with each other.

4. Suntest CPS - Tests the ability of a fabric to withstand direct sunlight. This accelerated process uses a xenon bulb to simulate how well a shirt, for example, is fade-resistant.

5. Twist Tester - Measures the amount of turns per inch that are put into a yarn. The more turns per inch, the stronger the thread.

6. Martindale Abrasion Tester - This machine uses a weight and abraded fabric to determine how resistant a fabric is to pilling and abrasion.

7. 45* Flammability Tester - Evaluates the propensity of a fabric to burn when it comes into contact with flame. The ASTM standard measures the time it takes from when a flame touches the fabric to ignite and climb five inches.