How A Sweater Is Made

Wool knitted clothes are knitwear (also called sweaters) made of wool. Their main characteristics are strong extensibility and good elasticity. Therefore, it can be close to the human body without hindering human movement, and has good softness and warmth retention, so it is comfortable to wear and has excellent wearing performance.

Next, we will introduce the production process of degradable knitted sweater.

Wool yarn entering factory → raw material inspection → preparation engineering → knitting engineering → garment engineering → finished knitted sweater inspection → sweater packaging and warehousing.

After the raw wool yarn enters the factory and is put into storage, the testing and laboratory department shall take samples in time to inspect such items as the nominal linear density and evenness of the yarn count, and only those items that meet the requirements can be put into use.

The incoming wool yarn is mostly in the form of skein yarn, which must go through the winding process to make it suitable for knitting on the flat knitting machine. The semi finished garment pieces after knitting are inspected and enter the garment process. The garment workshop shall perform mechanical or manual sewing according to the process requirements. According to the product characteristics, the garment process also includes such finishing processes as napping, flocking and embroidery. Finally, after inspection, ironing and shaping, retesting and sorting, the products are packed and warehoused in grades.

Garment making process

1. The ready-made clothing process uses sewing methods to connect the collar, sleeve, front and back body, buttons, pockets and other auxiliary materials of the knitting sweater, and some also use wet finishing methods, sweater embroidery methods to modify, so that the ready-made clothing has a certain style and characteristics. The general process flow of ready-made clothes is:

Sewing assembly → inspection of semi-finished products → flocking → keyhole fastener → ironing and setting → inspection of ready to wear

2. Garment process requirements

(1) Stitch requirements: The seam of the sweater should have the corresponding stretch and strength with the body. Except for the pockets, the elongation rate is usually required to reach 130%. In principle, the suture must be the same as the raw material, color and yarn linear density of the woolen sweater, and combed wool yarn shall be used as the suture of the combed product and the upper thread of the machine seam. The bottom thread of flat seam and overlock seam shall not have too high twist, and shall be soft, elastic, smooth and strong enough.

(2) Cashmere shrinking requirements: Cashmere shrinking is a wet finishing process, which uses the characteristics of animal fibers to make the fibers expand and soft after being soaked by heat and moisture. Under the action of friction, it shows short velvet, full hand feel and improved appearance. Shrinkage is applied to cashmere sweaters, rabbit hair sweaters, lambs sweaters and other rough combed products. Combed products can also be cleaned and wet finished at room temperature for a short time or light shrinkage to improve the appearance.

The auxiliary agent, temperature, bath ratio, time and other parameters used for felting must be properly selected; otherwise, if the felting is excessive, the products in batches will be felted and cannot be remedied. In the process of pile shrinkage, the degree of pile shrinkage must be checked midway, and the standard sample of pile surface shall be compared to prevent excessive pile shrinkage.

(3) Ironing and shaping: the purpose of ironing is to shape the product, maintain the style characteristics, and make the appearance flat, neat and comfortable. When ironing, put the sweater on the sample to meet the specifications. The setting temperature of the sweater is generally 120 ℃~180 ℃, and prevent "yellowing and aurora" during operation. During the ironing process, the sweaters should be ventilated to accelerate cooling and reduce humidity.

In recent years, more and more steam ironing machines (flattening machines) are used for shaping. They are composed of an automatic lifting upper ironing plate and a fixed lower ironing plate. The shaping time (steam injection time and dwell time) is between 4s and 30s, and its efficiency is greatly improved compared with manual ironing.

3. Finished product inspection

The inspection of a finished sweater is a comprehensive inspection before the product leaves the factory. There are three special processes in the inspection of woolen sweaters, namely, retesting, sorting and grading, including appearance quality (dimensional tolerance, appearance defects), physical indicators (single piece weight, needle ring density), and inner and outer sweater packaging.

During the finishing process of the sweater, a small number of defects that do not belong to the return range, such as oil stains that can be removed, residual grass chips, seams, etc., can generally be repaired at any time.