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 utilises different methods to produce a surface-ornamented fabric for various uses and markets.
Textile Design as a practice has become an integral industry 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, fibres are processed into yarn during the spinning, weaving, knitting, and processing stages, where fabric is made ready for 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 fibres are converted by passing through specific processes, including 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 forms a woven fabric, such as a khanga kitenge bedsheet or a Maasai shuka and Kikoy.
Knitting is processing in which the looping of yarns occurs to form a knitted fabric like a T-shirt, sweater, or mosquito nets.
After weaving or knitting, the fabric undergoes various wet preparation processes before dyeing or printing, allowing dyes and prints to penetrate or be absorbed easily.
Then, the fabric is dyed or printed into different designs according to the customer’s desire.
Additionally, the fabric may be sent to a garment manufacturing facility to be transformed into ready-to-wear clothes.
