Mekan Textile Blog

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Notes from the mill.

Practical guides on cotton fabric weights, weaves and printing, written for the people who buy and develop textiles.

Stacks of folded cotton fabrics printed with bold, colourful repeating patterns Designing a seamless repeat for printed fabric A printed fabric is one tile repeated hundreds of times. The way that tile repeats decides whether the pattern flows or shows its joins. Close-up of a pale blue cotton shirt collar with dark-rimmed buttons Combed vs carded cotton yarn: the difference you can feel Combed and carded cotton start from the same fibre but end up very different. Here is what each process does and where the difference matters in a finished fabric. Natural cotton canvas tote bag held up by its handles against a green wall Cotton canvas bags as promotional products: what to specify A promotional tote only works if people keep using it. That comes down to a handful of decisions in the brief, from fabric weight to handle length. Person wearing a navy bib apron with a white pinstripe over a white shirt Hotel and restaurant textiles: one supply plan for four products Tea towels, aprons, table linen and muslin are usually bought from four suppliers. Planning them as one range saves time, keeps colours consistent and makes reorders simple. Close-up of a diagonal twill weave in olive grey cotton Cotton drill: the workhorse for aprons, tea towels and workwear Drill is a plain-looking cloth with a lot of work in it. Here is what it is, how it relates to twill, and where a 255 gsm drill earns its place. Modern rapier weaving loom with grey cloth on the take-up roller and yarn packages on a creel beside it The selvedge: what the edge of a fabric tells you The narrow band along each edge of a roll is easy to ignore. It tells you the grain, often the face side, the usable width and how the cloth was woven and finished. Close-up of printed cotton in shades of teal and pale blue fading into cream Colour fastness tests for printed cotton, explained A fastness report is a row of numbers from 1 to 5. Here is what each test does to the fabric, and what a good result looks like for printed cotton. Open-weave cotton cheesecloth unrolled from a roll on a stone surface Cheesecloth for dairies: what cheesemakers need from the cloth Cheesecloth looks simple, but the wrong cloth slows draining, loses curd or wears out after a few washes. Here is what a dairy should specify. Stack of striped and white cotton tea towels tied with twine on a wooden stool Choosing a tea towel fabric: absorbency, lint and weave A good tea towel dries glasses without leaving fluff and still looks good after a hundred washes. The fabric decides most of that. Black and white photograph of a rotary screen printing line with a row of cylindrical screens over white cloth Pigment rotary printing: when screens beat digital for long runs Digital printing wins on flexibility. Once a design sells in volume, rotary screens usually win on cost per metre and on colour that repeats from order to order. Creased striped cotton shirt front with pearl buttons Why cotton wrinkles, and how weave and finish change it Cotton creases because of how its fibres hold water and heat. Weave, yarn, weight and finish decide how much that shows, and how quickly it falls out. Hanks of dyed cotton yarn in teal and yellow hung on bamboo poles to dry Yarn count (Ne) explained: what the number means for cotton Ne 20, Ne 40/2, Ne 80: yarn counts appear on most cotton spec sheets. Here is what the number measures and how it shapes the cloth woven from it.