OPEN END VS RINGSPUN COTTON
At Create A Tee we only stock Ringspun cotton garments. But what is ringspun cotton; you may wonder, isn’t a cotton garment just a cotton garment?
We all love a great tee. But, how the t-shirt turns out depends on more than time and wear. It depends majorly on the fabric used to make the garment. The most visible difference between t-shirts is how they behave after several washes. The changes are highly influenced by how the fabric yarn is spun. In this article we discuss two types of cotton spinning. Ring spun yarn and Open end yarn.
But first, what is cotton?
Cotton is a shrubby plant that is a member of the Mallow family. The name refers to the cream-colored fluffy fibers surrounding small cottonseeds called a boll. The small, sticky seeds must be separated from the wool in order to process the cotton for spinning and weaving. De-seeded cotton is cleaned, carded (fibers aligned), spun, and woven into a fabric that is also referred to as cotton. Cotton is easily spun into yarn as the cotton fibers flatten, twist, and naturally interlock for spinning. Half the fabric worn worldwide is cotton. That said, back to t-shirts. Sometimes you buy a tee and after a short while you notice it starts to stretch or shrink. But then sometimes you get a tee and it basically last years without any of these changes happening. And you may start to wonder, well, what is it! They are both t-shirts! Well that’s not all that they are. One is like cheap wine, next day you wake up with a banging headache, and the other is great wine, next day you wake up fresh and ready to get things done.
Ringspun cotton.
Ringspun cotton is made from the cotton which is continuously twisted together to make very fine cotton rope (yarn). Invented in 1828 by an American named Thorp, ring spinning has developed into one of the best methods of producing material for garments. The twisting action makes short cotton hairs stronger and softer.
Ringspun cotton offers two main advantages: strength and softness.
Because the ring-spinning process twists the cotton fibers together to hold the fiber bundle together, it is lighter in weight than regular cotton, but the fabric is softer, stronger and a lot more durable. In ringspun cotton, all of the fibers are aligned in the same direction. The short fibers that stick out of the fiber bundle on ringspun cotton also contribute to its softer feel.
Open ended cotton
Open end cotton is a cheaper way of turning cotton into yarn. It is a system of spinning cotton where the yarn is twisted by rotating at the hap or break in the flow. If you’ve ever worn a t-shirt that felt heavy, scratchy, cardboard-like then you know what open ended fabric feels like. Up close you can see that open end fiber is bulky, fuzzy and creates an uneven knit which explains the rougher feel and that’s because the wrapped fiber runs perpendicular to the fiber bundle. Bridging fibers are converted into hooks in the spinning process and this reduces the effective fiber length in the yarn. Fibers migrate in a different way and the fiber-helix wavelengths vary according to radius; also, fiber tensions are lower. All these factors tend to make the yarn weaker, more bulky, and more extensible. Because of these differences, the yarns behave in a different way in subsequent processing, and also the fabrics take on a different character from those normally encountered.
Conclusion
The amount of relaxation shrinkage occurring with open-end spun yarn is greater than that with ring spun yarn. Furthermore, open-end spun yarns tend to be weaker, which results in lower bursting strength, and the fabrics knitted from such yarns tend to pill more. Finally, so far as abrasion resistance is concerned, ring spun knits perform better than open-end spun knits.
