Thai Handicraft Clothing
Clothing and fibers: characteristics and care
I’d like to give you some information about different kinds of fabrics and fibers commonly used to make clothes.
Silk is an animal fiber used to make quite a precious cloth. In spite of its expensive price, it is hard for new artificial fibers to compete with it, because of its soft nice feeling on the skin and the shining look, both typical characteristics of this cloth.
Silk is at times woven with wool to get a wormer cloth out of it; or with rayon, to enhance its shine.
Cotton is a vegetable fiber of common use, a fabric easy to tailor and comfortable to wear.
From the fibers it can be woven either a very soft easy to handle cloth, or a much thicker, tougher one: think about the jeans to get an idea. The toughness of the cloth is due to the fiber’s amount of wetness, meaning the drier the fiber the softer the cloth you get from it.
Cotton is an all-weather fabric, and easy to preserve.
Rayon, a fiber coming from the cellulose of wood or cotton, turns into a cloth very similar to silk in the shining look and smoothness, soft enough to the touch. At first was called “artificial silk” or “wooden silk”, now it is well known as “rayon”, but there are not too honest salesmen who try to sell it as silk. However the cheap price, if compared to the silk’s one, should alert anyone.
Batik is called the technique to colour some cloth such as silk, cotton, linen and rayon. In Indonesia, especially in Bali and Giava, artists have reached a very refined technique in making batiks, prints with images and symbolic representations that are traditionally associated with their own country and culture, exquisite handmade works still maintaining affordable prices.
Some batiks are even more precious because of the golden shaded colours they are printed with.
Thai artists make use of batik technique too, but they draw geometric figures rather than religious subjects, and that of course because of the different cultural background.
Some advices on how to keep your clothes in good shape:
To keep your clothes nice and good first of all you must take good care in washing, drying and finally ironing them, therefore if you don’t quite know how to do it properly, I’ll give you some hints:
Washing:
never soak for too long clothes made out of silk and wool, or those that might give colour away, as well as fabrics with leather trims or garnished with some metallic component;
go for hand-wash rather than machine-wash
do not wash in a veryhot water
if no sure avoid bleaching
lined clothes mostly want dry-cleaning;
wash coloured cotton clothes separately;
wash silk-clothing quicklyin cold water, strictly by hand or have it dry-cleaning
new coloured clothes must be washed separately the first time;
turn inside out coloured or printed clothes before machine-washing them.
Drying:
If you can, do avoid tumble drying, hang out the clothes in the shade, drying in the sun might matt them.
Ironing:
It is a good habit to turn clothes inside out to press them, especiallyif there are printed matters on or are golden coloured. In alternative put a wet white cotton cloth between the iron plate and the clothing. Doing so you protect buttons and decorations, beside avoiding that a dull colour like the black becomes glossy, or that the fabric sticks to the iron plate.
If an article of clothing is made from different fabrics handle it as if it were a delicate one: wash
it in lukewarm water and iron low.
Some hints:
acrylic: press it inside out, no steam-iron, no wet cloth, just iron low.
nylon, polyester, acetate, rayon: press them inside out, steam-iron, or use a wet white cloth and iron low.
silk: press it inside out, no steam-ironor wet cloth, just iron medium hot and don’t press hard on the seams.
cotton, linen: press them inside out, use steam iron or a wet cloth, iron high.
The last change to this page was done 04/01/2010
These pages are hosted on the website Ciao Phuket
