Felt

A to Z Challenge 2026 – Non-woven and “N” Fabrics…

April 16, 2026April 11, 2026humanist55

“Choose any subject you would like to write about…” that is the object of the A to Z Challenge, and thinking of things that interest me is not a problem for me, but choosing a subject not only to write about, but to write in a way that other people will catch my interest – that is the real challenge! This year I turn to a subject, close to our skin if not our hearts, and yet, again, I wonder if this subject will get some people past the title on the list – dismissed as niche? For this year, my theme is What We Wear – Fabrics and Fibres

Why, when our Bonobo chimp-like ancestors were forced by climate change to emerge from the shrinking forests and live out in the open, did they become less hirsute such that as we spread to almost all parts of the world, there were places we could only survive by clothing ourselves in the fur of other animals. In warmer places, we had used other things to fashion clothes out of, such as bark, and possibly even the apocryphal fig-leaves! When agriculture enabled us to produce food more efficiently, we had the time to develop new skills like spinning and weaving, but we still use leather and fur to this day, even if, for ethical or economic reasons, we prefer faux-leather and faux-fur. Of course, most leather is also a byproduct of the meat industry (just as much wool is a byproduct of rearing sheep for meat rather than wool) and until true acceptance of the reality of our current climate change forces us to eat less meat, we will continue to produce leather…

Leather

I am not going to lift the entire and very excellent Wikipedia article on making leather, but suffice it to say that there are three main stages – Preparatory (10 possible sub-stages), Tanning, and Crusting with an optional stage of Surface Coating. The reason all this is necessary is because without it, animal skin would be stiff when dried and once wetted again, would resume rotting. So elements of the skin are removed, acidity levels ar manipulated at several points in the process and dyeing and surface treating are used to make the leather we use for shoes, handbags and clothes.

Non-woven Fabric

Nonwoven fabric or non-woven fabric is a fabric-like material made from staple fibre (short) and long fibres (continuous long), bonded together by chemical, mechanical, heat or solvent treatment. The term is used in the textile manufacturing industry to denote fabrics, such as felt, which are neither woven nor knitted.^[1] Some non-woven materials lack sufficient strength unless densified or reinforced by a backing. Wikipedia

And even fashion clothing – remember Paper dresses in the 60’s.

This category of fabrics includes a number of production processes but often, some form of felting (mechanical entanglement of fibres), is followed by heat-treating to melt the “felt” into one cohesive fabric, possibly with some additional filler materials introduced into the felt first. You may not have heard the term non-woven but you are likely using any number of them every day! Check out the links in the picture captions for more…

Felt from wool is one of the oldest known textiles. Excavations at Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia have revealed possible evidence of felting about 6000 BCE; more definitely, felt hats found in the Mongolian Autonomous Region of China date to c. 1800 BCE. – Wikipedia – Felt

Although Felt can be made from both natural and artificial fibres, natural fibre felt has special properties, it is “fire-retardant and self-extinguishing; it dampens vibration and absorbs sound; and it can hold large amounts of fluid without feeling wet…” and for one of the oldest fabrics, it is still produced for many commercial purposes todat, but is also hugely popular in crafting circles where both matted felting and needle felting are carried out. Both of these processes have their place in industrial felt production too. Here is a great piece of jargon from a description of that industrial felting process – “Fibers are first spun, cut to a few centimeters length, and put into bales. The staple fibers are then blended, “opened” in a multistep process, dispersed on a conveyor belt, and spread in a uniform web by a wetlaid, airlaid, or carding/crosslapping process.”

Felt has been one of the principal materials for Millinery – hat-making due to its ability to stretch into 3-D shapes and then retain that shape…

Paper

Making paper is very similar to felt-making – the fibres – and many materials can be used, including recycled textiles – are dispersed in a water bath and then lifted out in a dekle – a kind of sieve that is agitated to make the fibres “fel” together as the water drains out. The resulting layer is pressed and treated in various ways to make it less porous and more durable. This also makes the paper stiff, but take a brown paper bag, screw it up, carefully smooth it out and repeat several times and you will have a flexible fabric. Add some tougher long fibres into the paper mix and you have a material that can make clothing, albeit of limited lifespan…

From Valerie Steele discusses MFIT paper dresses

Latex

If the fear with paper clothes might be that of them tearing or dissolving in a rain-shower, then the fear (however unfounded) around wearing latex clothing, must surely be that the item might pop like a balloon, shrivelling away to nothing in what would surely be the ultimate fashion accident!

Latex rubber is used in the manufacture of many types of clothing. It has traditionally been used to make protective clothing, including gas masks and Wellington boots. Mackintoshes have traditionally been made from rubberized cloth. However, rubber has now generally been replaced in these applications by synthetic polymers.

Latex rubber as a clothing material is common in fetish fashion and among BDSM practitioners, and is often worn at fetish clubs. It is sometimes also used by couturiers for its unusual appearance. Several magazines are dedicated to its use. Latex clothing tends to be skin-tight, but can also be loose-fitting. – Wikipedia

Moving swiftly on…

“N” Fabrics

Nankeen – (also called Nankeen cloth) is a kind of pale yellowish cloth originally made in Nanjing, China from a yellow variety of cotton, but subsequently manufactured from ordinary cotton that is then dyed.
The term blue nankeen describes hand-printed fabric of artistic refinement and primitive simplicity, which originated on the Silk Road over three thousand years ago.

Noil – refers to the short fibres that are removed during the combing process in spinning. These fibres are often then used for other purposes.
Fibres are chosen for their length and evenness in specific spinning techniques, such as worsted.[1] The short noil fibres are left over from the combing of wool or spinning silk. We already encountered one form of Noil in Matka, made from damaged silk cocoons resulting in a slubby finished silk. Noil is similar in the fabrics spun and then woven from it. Noil fibres can also be added to other fibre blends.

I compiled a list of as many fabrics, fibres and related items as possible (278 items which I will make available at the end of the A to Z), from several sources, the most comprehensive of which was Wikipedia. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, I could not write in detail about every instance so I have taken snippets of text for the brief descriptions and linked to the source in the name of the item. I am indebted to all the contributors to those Wikipedia pages and the depth of knowledge to be found there…

A to Z Challenge 2026 – “F” for Fibres that make Fabrics and some “F” fabrics too.

April 7, 2026March 14, 2026humanist55

Before there were fabrics as we think of them today, that is, woven or knitted, there were skins, fur and leather and for fabrics to come about, the concept of “fibres” which could be combined to make a yarn – the basis of all fabrics, had to be conceived. The sources of fibres fell into two groups – animal and plant-based. One can imagine how plants such as cotton,simply cried out to find some way of making their fluffy bolls into some form that would allow them to be combined. The answer was of course, spinning… We all know about spinning wheels from fairy tales like Rapunzel, but before those quite elaborate inventions, there were simpler ways of spinning fibres – the spindle or drop spindle. What all spinning devices do, is to allow you take a pinch of, say, wool, and as you draw it out into a thinner configuration, the device spins the wool into a yarn, which causes the fibre to bind together into a yarn. The video below shows how to use a drop-spindle and the one after that shows some of the ways the process was elaborated on. As we said in the first post on Weaving – Stone Age tooolmakers grasped the significance of twisting, which increases strength by diverting part of any tensile strength into lateral pressure”.¹
The video below shows how to use the simplest and oldest form of spinning tool…

Next is a video which takes us through some of the more elaborate forms os hand-spinning tools, up to and including the spinning wheel.

These simple methods could work with animal or plant fibres and once a thin yarn was produced, then two or more thin yarns could be further twisted, or plied, together – hence 2-ply, 3-ply etc.

What happened after that, was simply increased mechanisation and in 1764, James Hargreaves of Lancashire, England, invented the Spinning Jenny, which could spin multiple yarns simultaneously which took the production of yarn from cottage industry where one yarn at a time was produced by hand, to a mill based industry.

In the 20^th Century, synthetic and semi-synthetic fibres were added to the possibilities, either by combining fibres in a blend with the natural ones to form blended yarns with improved performance characteristics, or used entirely on their own – I will cover them under “S”, but all I will say for now, is that synthetic fibres need not necessarily be spun since they can emerge as a coherent yarn in the first place and that due to the ability to extrude synthetic fibres at very consistent sizes, they can be used to relace or augment natural fibres from cotton to silk….

So what are the fibres that have clothed us for centuries? Well, on the animal side, the hairs from bovines, camels, goats (Angora, Mohair) horse-hair, rabbit, reindeer and of course sheep (wool) – all of which offer fibres straight from the hide, and, by a much more convoluted process, Silk, which is made from the unwound cocoons of the silk worm. Sinews and gut were also early sources of fibre. Even casein (milk protein) can be treated and spun into fibres.

A project of mine – knitted on large needles from Angora Wool – a very fluffy yarn…

On the plant side, nettles were an early source of fibre for string and rope whilst tree bark – bast, made early non-woven fabrics. Cotton, linen (flax), Jute, Sisal, Palm (Raffia) and Tow (coarse fibres extracted during the preparation of other fibres like linen) were the classic fibres, but today, bamboo, eucalyptus, soybean, aloe vera and even the dried leather from kombucha have been added to the repertoire! Some of these, are sources of cellulose and form the source material of the “semi-synthetics” which we will come to under “S”.

Fabrics beginning with F:

Faille – is a structured fabric characterised by very fine ribs, it is usually made from silk.

Faux Fur, Leather and Suede – these are all fabrics woven to simulate the appearance of other substances.

Felt – felting is a method of producing fabric without weaving by matting, condensing and pressing fibres. It allows fabric to be shaped directly into 3-dimensional shapes such as hats. Although initially produced from natural fibres, felting is a technique that works with almost any kind of fibre. It is fire-retardant and self-extinguishing; it dampens vibration and absorbs sound; and it can hold large amounts of fluid without feeling wet.

Boy George wearing one of his iconic Felt hats

Fibre Glass – Glass Re-enforced Plastic (GRP) begins with a matted fabric composed of fine glass fibres which are welded together with a plastic resin to make such things as sailing boats.

Fishnet – is a machine knitted fabric with a diamond shaped hole pattern and has become a staple of hosiery and especially beloved as part of punk fashion.

Siouxsie Sioux photographed by Joe Bangay , 1981

Flannel (and Flannelette) – is a soft woven fabric of varying fineness. Flannel was originally made from carded wool or worsted yarn, but is now often made from either wool, cotton, or synthetic fibre. Flannel is commonly used to make tartan clothing, blankets, bed sheets, sleepwear, and several other uses.

Jenny Agutter waving her red petticoat to prevent disaster in the Railway Children (1970) https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2023/11/02/red-hats-and-petticoats/

Fustian – Fustian means thick cotton cloth – an old fabric, it ranges from straightforward twilled fabric such as denim, to cut textiles that are analogous to velvet and have names such as velveteen, moleskin. In the first fustian fabric, which dates back to the medieval ages, cotton was used for the weft, and linen was used for the warp. It would appear that the phrase quickly lost some of its distinctiveness and eventually came to be used to designate a coarse cloth that was made of wool and linen.

Fustians such as Corduroy, that have added long fibres as well as Faux Furs, require special looms that incorporate the additional fibres which after weaving in, are cut to produce the ridges in the corduroy.

Corduroy: This modern diagram shows the warp (3) and the long (red-4) and short (green-5) weft threads; traditionally the knife (1) and the guide (2) are attached and the cutting motion is upwards.

World Textiles by Mary Schoeser – A Concise History, Thames & Hudson world of art 2003 pp. 10

I compiled a list of as fabrics, fibres and related items as possible (278 items), from several sources, the most comprehensive of which was Wikipedia. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, I could not write in detail about every instance so I have taken snippets of text for the brief descriptions and linked to the source in the name of the item. I am indebted to all the contributors to those Wikipedia pages and the depth of knowledge to be found there…