1. Base cloth's variety and performance

Base cloth usually can be classified into three varieties: shuttle-woven fabric, warp-knitted laid fabric and non-woven fabric. However, every variety of them can also be classified into different sorts according to their yarn, density, fiber component and weight.

Shuttle-woven fabric is interweaved by warp yarn and weft yarn. Common fabric's structures are plain weave and twill. The fineness of raw yarn in the structure specification is represented with TEX. But at present, it is usually continuously represented with S. The higher the yarn count is, the lower the weight is and the thinner the single yarn fabric is. The lower the yarn count is, the higher the weight is and the thicker the fabric is. The commonly used yarn counts of base cloth of fusible interlining are: waist lining-7S and 10s, shirt lining-16S, 20S, 21S, 40S, 45S; chest lining-16S, 21S/2, 28S/2, 30S and 40 S. Plain weave fabric structure is quite stiff and it is suitable for the making of collar, pocket, closing lining. Twill fabric structure has soft hand feeling and well-drape and it is suitable for the making of the chest lining of various garments.

Knitted fabric is knitted by knitting machine and is not influenced by warp-wise or filling-wise. It has good elasticity and softness. The knitted fabrics used on base cloth are mainly warp-knitted laid in stitch. Warp-knitted laid in stitch is a kind of fabric which has been lined by weft yarn during warp knitting. Its performance is similar with that of shuttle-woven fabric and it has good steadiness of modality. Warp-knitted laid in stitch is suitable to be used as the chest lining of cotton garment or the lining of cotton fashionable clothes. Its common specifications are 50D×16S、50D×20S,etc. Among them warp yarn is polyester filament and weft yarn is cotton rayon blended yarn or polyester low-elastic yarn (common specification 30D-350D). Within the indicating ways of specification, D represents the fineness of polyester filament.

Non-woven fabric is produced by mechanical and chemical methods after carding the fiber to network. Non-woven fabric usually adopts chemical fiber as material. It is divided into different specifications by its weight: thin type 15-30g/m2, medium type 30-50g/m2,thick type 50-80g/m2. Non-woven fusible interlining has low weight, stable washing size, good shape-retention and low price. And after the cutting, the slash will not ravel. It is the most generally and largely used lining of garment industry in recent years.

Both shuttle weaving and knitting are called weaving. The components that compose woven base cloth are cotton fiber, polyester fiber, viscose fiber, etc. Besides single-component cotton fabric, there are polyester and cotton blended fabric, polyester and rayon blended fabric, etc. Cotton fabric has large water shrinkage and low thermo-shrinkage; polyester cotton fabric has good elasticity and low water shrinkage; polyester rayon fabric has soft hand feel and good drape. T

2、Base cloth's pretreatment.

The base cloth of fusible interlining is directly bonded to garment fabric to exert its functions. That demands the base cloth should have the characteristics matching garment fabric, such as size stability, elasticity, drapability, etc. Therefore, the fusible interlining which uses woven fabric as base cloth should go through preliminary finish and after-processing before being coated. Both preliminary finish and after-processing are called by a joint name of pretreatment.

Preliminary finish is to do the technical processing of desizing, scouring and bleaching to the base cloth. Its effect influenced the quality of fusible interlining directly and decides many major indexes such as lining's whiteness, coating quantity, water shrinkage, thermo-shrinkage, etc. The base cloth which have different components adopt different preliminary finish techniques for their different chemical properties and physical indexes. Preliminary finish techniques include:

Gassing is to eliminate the fine lousiness of gray goods'surface. Because the lousiness of face side is useful for adhesion, all the base cloth except the special ones do not need gassing.

The function of desizing, boiling-out and bleaching is to eliminate the slurry, nep foreign matter and substances associated with cellulose on the fabric, to promote fabric's inbibition, expansion and contraction which will be useful for the stability of base cloth and improve fabric's permeability. Dyed base cloth should go through the dyeing process.

After-processing is mainly to improve base cloth's hand feel and control its dimensional stability and width. After-processing techniques include: raising-resin finishing-stretching---fixation-compressive shrinking

Raising is to create a layer of fuzzy pile on base cloth in some mechanical way. Its major aim is to improve the bulkiness and hand feel of base cloth. Resin finishing is to do chemical anti-crease finishing and anti-shrinking finishing to base cloth---use the double-function organic compound which can make linkage reaction with fiber hydroxyle group to make crosslinking reaction among the molecules to create the effect of anti-crease, anti-shrinking and good hand feel. Stretching is to fix the width of base cloth in high speed on the standard size to ensure the complete consistence of width during the coating of base cloth. Stretching can go along with resin finishing or thermofixation at the same time.

Chemical base cloth needs to go through thermofixation. That can heat it to the needed temperature and give it the proper tension. Then it will be cooled rapidly to let the fiber molecules arrange once again under the heating condition and eliminate the internal stress of fabric and improve the dimensional stability.

Compressive shrinking is to make base cloth occurs physical change in some mechanical way and further reduce the shrinkage of base cloth. The effect will better if it is cotton fabric to adopt the way of compressive shrinking.