Jacket

 

For our own choice, we decided to work with a wool/acrylic fabric, relevant to use for jackets. 









Fabric
The fabric is a wool and acrylic blend - 86% acrylic and 14% wool.
Before we knew the percentage of each material, we did a test where we used caliumhydroxid to seperate the wool from the acrylic, to see how big a percent each fiber were of the garment. The test showed that it consisted of 78% acrylic and 22 % wool. The difference from the actual percentage, could be due to the small sample we used for the test. A larger sample could give a more accurate result. 

 One thing that suprised us was when we did a burning test. When burning the threads, wool smells like burned hair, and acrylic like plastic. When we did the test we found that it the smell was like burned hair, which was surprising, due to acrylic being the largest part of the garment.  

 

 Wool is a natural protein fiber. Wool has a very good thermal insulation, which is a good property when making jackets. Further wool is elastic and extensible, which makes it comfortable to wear without using elastane. 
Wool is blended with synthetic fibers like acrylic in this case, to improve the durability and easycare, it can also be to cheapen the price, because acrylic is a very cheap fiber. 
Acrylic is a synthetic polymer. Acrylic has a wool-like handle, which makes it ideal for blending with wool. Acrylic yarns are often voluminous and very soft and warm, which clearly can be seen in our fabric. 




 


To test if the easycare when washing, had been improved after blending, we did our own washing test. We tried to wash a sample of the fabric in 60 degrees water for 30 min. Usually wool should be washed at 30 degrees. After the wash the fabric had shrinked, and many small fibers could be seen on the surface. We concluded that even though there were only 14% wool in the fabric, it still has an influence when washing.

We did a tear test (ISO 13937-2), to test the strenght of the fabric. The sample ripped at 59,21 N, which we believe is good. 

Construction 
The weave is a plain weave, this is very clear due to the thick threads used. 
The fabric is woven very loose, which could also explain the degree of pilling we saw, when doing the martindale pilling test (ISO 12945-2):
125 turns - there is some small gatherings of fibers, and some pilling. 
500 turns - there is a lot of pilling and the threads filtered together.
2000 turns  - the threads were even more filtered together, and it was hard to get the two fabrics away from eachother. 

We looked in a microscope to see how many wool fibers we could see, and it was very clear that mostly it consisted of acrylic - we only found few wool fibers. 

Dyeing  
We believe that the fibers have been colored seperately when they were still at the fiber stage. 
When dying wool the most common dyestuff is acid, which is applied from an acidic dyebath. Chrome, which is another dyestuff for wool is only used when working with very special colors. 
The dyestuff used for acrylic is a basic dyestuff. This is the only possibility when working with acrylic.