Men's jeans

This time we worked with men's jeans. The jeans we have worked with contains 99 % cotton and 1 % elastane.





The fabric
Cotton is a natural cellulose fiber and it comes from the cotton plant.

As with most jeans the fabric is cotton mixed with a little bit of elastane. Cotton alone is not elastic, so to get higher comfort when wearing jeans, it is often blended with elastane. When working with cotton fabrics you need to be aware that it can shrink up to   10%. Cotton is a very strong fiber, which is a very relevant advantage when using it for jeans. 200kg of raw cotton fibers is enough to produce 325 pairs of jeans. The degree of pilling in cotton depends on the quality. The higher the quality the less pilling and opposite. 

Composition
The fabric used for the jeans is a woven fabric. It is a warp faced 2/1 twill. It can be seen by the dominance of warp yarns on the front side. 


Dyeing 
The warp treads are dyed using a beam dyeing. 
The connection between the cotton and the dyestuff is not very strong, and therefore the color fades over time. To check the color fastness on our jeans, we did a washing test. The result shows that it still stains other fabrics even though it is an old pair of jeans. This emphasizes the theory. Further on, we made a rubbing test both using wet and dry cotton. The dry test stained a little,but nothing compared to the wet test. This was not a surprise as it is very common with jeans. The fabric is made of blue warp threads and white weft threads, this is done because otherwise the jeans would be too blue.   


One square meter of our fabric weighs 415g. In order to make one pair of jeans you need approximately 1,6m of fabric. This would make the total weight of our jeans 664g. 


If you want more information about the process of making cotton you can take a look at the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZWe0sYglc