Duck Fabric Directory

What Duck Fabric Is

Cotton duck is a plain-weave fabric woven with two warp yarns working together and a heavier filling yarn, packed into one of the densest and strongest cloths the plain weave can produce. It is the top end of the canvas family - every duck is a canvas, though most canvas is not duck - and its name has nothing to do with the bird: it comes from the Dutch word doek, simply meaning cloth, carried into English through the sailcloth trade. Duck's flat, even surface, tight grain and stubborn resistance to wind, water penetration and tearing made it the default material for sails, tents, hammocks, sandbags and heavy bags long before synthetics entered those markets.

Duck is graded by a numbering system unique in the fabric trade: numbered duck runs from No. 1, the heaviest, down through No. 12, with the number derived from the cloth's weight against a standard - and the scale runs backwards to intuition, so a lower number means a heavier fabric. Alongside the numbered grades sit the trade's named forms: single-fill and double-fill duck, Army duck (a fine, tight double-fill grade long used for military goods), and boat duck. A specification that says only duck has said almost nothing; the grade number or the ounces per square yard are the actual specification, as the fuller treatment on the Canvas Fabric Directory page explains for the wider family.

Buying and Using Duck

Choose the grade by the load the cloth must carry. The heavy numbered ducks serve industrial belting, tarpaulins, equipment covers and heavy tote and tool bags; mid grades cover upholstery, tents, awnings and workwear such as chore coats and aprons; the lightest ducks shade into apparel and craft cloth. Finishes decide the rest of the performance: water-repellent and mildew-resistant treatments for outdoor goods, flame-retardant finishes for industrial and theatre use, and waxed duck for traditional outdoor clothing and bags. Untreated cotton duck shrinks noticeably on wetting, so goods cut to a finished size are either made from preshrunk cloth or cut with the shrinkage allowed for. Sewing heavy duck is its own discipline - industrial machines, heavy needles and strong thread are the standard kit - and that production cost is worth remembering when comparing duck against lighter canvas for a bag or cover: the cloth price is only part of what the finished article costs to make well.

Around this directory, the Fabric Directory hub covers the full woven family, and the trade runs through the Machinery directory, Clothing Industry Factories, Yarn Factories, Fabric Retail and Fabric Wholesalers, with the Fibers Directory and Fabric Definitions alongside. Duck mills overlap heavily with the canvas list in this directory - the same weaving sheds run both, grading the output by weight - so a mill enquiry about one cloth is a sensible place to ask about the other.

Using This Directory

The listings below are the complete set for this category as Apparel Search carries it: five mills across Pakistan, India and China, each linked to its own profile in the Fabric Mills by Name section. No listing has been added or removed. A short list suits a cloth this standardised: duck is a commodity woven to published grades, and buyers choose between mills on grade range, width, finish and price rather than on design. Industry readers also use Fashion Industry News, Clothing Industry Employment and Conversion Charts. Order a swatch of the exact grade before committing to yardage - duck grades a single number apart differ clearly in stiffness and hand, and heavy duck is expensive freight to return. Thank you for using the Apparel Search Fabric Mill Directory.

Duck Fabric Mills Listed in This Directory