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Ever wonder how fiber gets turned into fabric? The process is fascinating and will give you a lot more respect to the shirt you’re wearing right now.
First the fiber is weighed on scales, 50% recycled poly, 25% organic cotton, and 25% modal. The correct weights go into a hopper for blending blending. Here you see us beginning to make our Aluminum heather gray which uses black polyester instead of clear. Thats where you get the heather black from, not from dye, from fiber up. From blending the fiber goes through the blow room where it starts to align fibers into strands, then the carding frame and drawing frame where flying individual fibers aligned in parallelization and form a fibre tape. While this looks like a rope, it's actually super soft and fluffy at this point. This is where it enters the spinner where the fiber gets wound and strengthened three times.
Allmade yarn is 30 singles, which is a measurement of the diameter of the yarn and dictates the weight and smoothness of the fabric. We found 30 singles to be a good yarn type because it creates a stable fabric, not too lightweight, and a great printing surface. This yarn gets transferred to cones.
Here is our alum heather gray cone and a natural cone. These cones go into a knitting machine. Yes that’s right, we knit the fabric like your grandma did-just super fast and super small. Your screen mesh is woven, your shirt is knitted.
Fabric is knitted on a giant loom and is knitted into a round tube. Some shirts use tubular fabric and knit each shirt body size.
Allmade uses a cut side seem so we knit all of our fabric to the same width and then cut it open in the dyeing and finishing process.
Through this process we dictate two styles of our fabric. 1 is a clear natural color. And the other uses the black polyester fiber to create our alum heather grey.
Allmade Tri Blend shirts contain 6 recycled plastic bottles per shirt on average.