By Rosemary David – Art in Tanzania internship
Textile designing is the creative and technical process by which thread or yarn fibres are woven together or interlaced to form a flexible, functional, and decorative cloth or fabric subsequently printed upon or otherwise adorned.
Textile design is further broken down into three primary disciplines: printed textile design, woven textile design, and mixed media textile design, each of which utilizes different methods to produce a surface ornamented fabric for variable uses and markets.
Textile Design as a practice has become an industry integral to other disciplines such as fashion, interior design and fine arts.
Textile design in Tanzania is most applicable to the textile manufacturing and fashion industries.
In textile manufacturing, fibers are processed into yarn in the spinning, weaving, knitting, and processing stages, where fabric is made in ready-wear.
Spinning is the twisting together of drawn-out strands of fibres to form yarn, though it is colloquially used to describe the process of drawing out, inserting the twist, and winding onto bobbins. Spinning is a process in which we convert fibres by passing through specific processes like Blow room, Carding, Drawing, Combing, Simplex, Ring Frame, and finally winding into yarns.
Weaving is interlacing two individual strands of yarn or thread at right angles. This pattern creates a strong yet flexible structure that holds the individual threads in place, thus creating a solid cloth or fabric.
The yarns undergo the weaving stage, where the interlacement of warps and weft yarns at a right angle form a woven fabric like a khanga kitenge bedsheet or Maasai shuka and Kikoy.
Knitting is processing in which the looping of yarns occurs to form a knitted fabric like T-shirt sweater mosquito’ nets.
After weaving or knitting, the fabric undergoes different wet preparation processes before dyeing or printing so that dyes and prints can penetrate easily or be absorbed.
Then, the fabric is dyed or printed into different designs according to the customer’s desire
Also, the fabric may be sent to garment manufacturing to be made into ready-to-wear garments.
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