Fabric Mills Directory - Page 5

What This Page of the Directory Covers

This fifth page closes the Fabric Mill Directory's alphabet: Ultrasuede opens it, followed by Velcro, Velour, Velvet and Viole, then Vynil, Waffle and Waterproof fabric, and Wool and Yarn Dyed to finish. The category listings below are the page's complete set, the navigation back to pages 1 to 4 is in the menu at the foot of the page, and the page also carries the directory's link to its guide to synthetic fabrics - fitting, since so much of this final run is man-made: ultrasuede is a microfiber imitation of suede, velour and much commercial velvet are knitted or woven from synthetics, vynil is a coated material rather than a woven cloth at all, and the waterproof category is largely a story of synthetic membranes and coatings. Wool, the oldest fiber in the list, and yarn dyed fabric, a method rather than a material, bring the alphabet to a characteristically mixed end.

The V run is the pile-and-surface end of the directory. Velvet, velour and ultrasuede all sell a surface - a dense, soft pile or its microfiber imitation - and their category pages explain how that surface is woven, knitted, flocked or bonded, how it wears, and why two cloths with the same name can differ so much in price. Waffle fabric is structure again, a woven or knitted honeycomb that traps air and absorbs water; viole is the opposite pole, a light, sheer, semi-transparent cotton or synthetic lawn. Waterproof fabric closes the functional side: not a fiber but a performance, achieved by coating, laminating or tightly weaving, and specified - like the flame retardant and filter categories on the earlier pages - by test figures rather than by hand. A reader who has worked through all five pages has met every way the industry sorts cloth: by fiber, by structure, by surface and by function.

How to Use the Directory Pages

Start the category for your cloth, read how it is made and specified, then follow its mills to their Fabric Mills by Name profiles for records and contact details. This page's supporting links mirror the rest of the directory's closing resources - the fabric manufacturers page, yarn factories, fabric retail and wholesalers, the fibers and textile machinery directories, the clothing manufacturer directory, the waterproof system, registered trademarks, retail antique textiles, fabric finishes and conversion charts - and they are preserved in full below, together with the guide to synthetic fabrics, which is the right background reading for most of this page's categories. To view more fabric categories, return to the Fabric Mill Directory main page or step back through pages 4, 3, 2 and 1; the whole directory is one alphabet, split into five pages only to keep each page readable.

No category has been added or removed from this page, and no listing anywhere in the five-page directory has been dropped in this rebuild. Readers reaching the end of the alphabet here have one more resource worth knowing: many of this page's mills also appear in the Fabric Mills by Name section under their company names, where their profiles gather everything the directory carries about them in one place - the category listings answer 'who makes this cloth', and the name profiles answer 'what else does this company do'. Learn about fashion made with these fabrics across the wider Apparel Search site once the cloth is sourced - the directory's job ends, as it always has, at the mill door. Thank you for using the Apparel Search Fabric Mill Directory.

Fabric Categories Listed on Directory Page 5