How Does Bamboo Become Fabric?

How is Bamboo Made into Fabric?

Bamboo is not just about cute pandas eating its shoots anymore. It has become an excellent fabric choice! The popularity of bamboo material is on its rise: as an eco-friendly alternative to cotton with many benefits, bamboo products get more and more fans. From clothing to pillows, bamboo is used to make a wide variety of products. So the question is: How is bamboo fabric made?

We could go on and on about all the features we love about our bamboo apparel, but sometimes it's crazy to think it actually is, in fact, made from bamboo! Take a look at the step-by-step process of bamboo fabric creation:

  1. Plant bamboo: Bamboo is a fast-growing evergreen plant that doesn’t need chemicals to grow.
  2. Harvest bamboo plants: Once new shoots grow, it’s the right time to harvest bamboo. In most cases, it’s the end of the rainy season – the beginning of the dry season.
  3. Cut bamboo into strips and chips: With the help of a wood saw or a metal saw, find the nodes and find the lower ring also known as the sheath ring. 
  4. Turn the bamboo into a pulp: Once it’s ready, turn stalks into small piece of raw bamboo. Then, use the pulper to put chips, keep the temperature in the pulper high, and heat it with steam to get bamboo pulp.
  5. Pour the liquid through a filter to create long fibers: With the help of chemicals, manufacturers soak the bamboo chips for 1-3 hours to extract the cellulose from them and then transform this material into sheets.
  6. Combine water and amine oxide to soften the fiber: Manufacturers put cellulose in a solution of sodium hydroxide (15-20%) to soak it.
  7. Spin it into bamboo yarn: After soaking, it’s important to let the material dry so that it will be easier to separate and spin the fiber into threads which are then spun into bamboo fiber yarns.
  8. Weave into bamboo fabric: With the weaving method of the textile production, manufacturers turn yarns or threads into fabric.

From growing bamboo plants to weaving fabric, it takes much time to create the final product. Now that you know how BambooYou pieces are made, you can shop with confidence! SHOP HERE

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