Knitting
fluff
For my final exam at the Design Academy (former Academy Industrial Design) I worked with a fake fur knitting machine. As opposed to imitation fur, I wanted to use this technique to blow a fibre just locally through the knit. You can then vary in colour, gloss or length of the fibre. With the circular knitting technique of pile knitting in China I started to develop a transparent curtain fabric.
The disadvantage of pile knitting is that you always need to paste a layer of glue behind the knit to attach the fibre.
A sample with several colours in the sliver, in an intimate blend. The sample has been ironed once and heated once making the fibre curl up, or retract.
In circular knitting the needles are set in a circle. Circular knitting uses a variable number of bobbins for the feed, dependent on the diameter of the knit. Well-known applications of circular knits are socks/tights, T-shirts, swimsuit fabrics and tops.
In a pile knit, fibres of the sliver are blown through a circular knitting machine from the outside. This creates a pile, in other words raised fibres, on the inside of the knit. Subsequently the pile knit is cut and counter-pasted to fix the fibres. Counter-pasted means that a layer of glue is pasted behind the knit.
