Modern living is now the restless urge for the new standard platform to “instant gratification seekers” with constant desire to make the home furnishing according to individual lifestyle, interest and taste. With professional advice as well as online information available on architectural aspect and decorations, this calls for extended range of fabric qualities for home textiles. The home textiles basket today has to be full of high
performance fabrics and multiple utility products.
As the understanding of product attributes, the home textile furnishing widens to fulfill aspiration of users, it demands for performance oriented textiles in all the aspects.
Space designing and furnishing being the crucial parts, needs fabrics specialization and selection as the major step to provide paramount utility and interest.
One of the most important need in furnishing starts with curtains.
Curtains are important item of home textiles and are generally preferred with materials like jacquard, dobby woven fabric, printed fabrics, piece dyed fabric with structured or plain weave depending upon the correlation with interior of room.
Although, the traditional concept of single layer curtains is most widely used but the two layer curtain concept has also been introduced that needs one layer for the purpose of being 100% opaque so that there is no outside light and the second one solves the purpose of decoration and could be a lighter fabric as compared to the first layer.
The decorated fabrics for curtains can be printed on flatbed, rotary or digital prints. The common fabric weight for main curtain material lies in 150 – 200 grams.
Moving on to the living area the fabrics lay on the sofa are generally of the jacquard, piece dyed, velvet prints, flocked fabric, dobby design, chenille fabrics and leather at times.
The sofa is grouped with cushions, these are available in a variety of ranges like shapes such as square, rectangle, circular and sizes with wide variety of textured and decorated fabrics according to the use. Cushions were originally filled with cotton, feathers and fabric scrap but this has now been replaced to polyester hollow fiber .
Living area and bedrooms include area rugs for a lavish display and the snug and pleasant experience.
Carpet is a textile product consisting of two layers, upper layer call “pile” attached with pre woven lower layer. Carpet is generally made from wool, jute fiber or man made synthetic fiber. The carpet construction can be woven, tufted and bonded.
The construction can be hand woven on handloom, modern looms or tufted rugs and latest addition to these are the machine knotted rugs. The size for the area rugs varies widely and the most common face fibers are wool, nylon, polyester, polypropylene, cotton, viscous. The bulk of area rugs are constructed with cut piles and combination
of loop and cut.
The main factors affecting carpet durability are fiber weight, pile density and yarn stiches per inch.
The modern living has equally affected all parts of the household including kitchen. These now have kitchen towels normally done with flat woven textiles with basket weave, plain weave in yarn dyed jacquard design.
There are fabrics used for mopping and wiping too. Apron and oven mitts or com monly called oven gloves are one of the essentials nowadays.
As we move from living area to bedrooms the textile contribution recasts itself to comfortability as the major concern. The bed linen story has aspects like mattress, cover, bed sheet, bedspread, blanket, comforter,
pillow, pillow cover and cushions.
The bedroom also includes an area rug and some decorative runners for the furnishings. The production of these usually is hand knotted, tufted, woven or knitted with a wide variety of natural as well as artificial yarns.
The textile plays part in the bathrooms as well. These may include bathroom towel can be hand or bathing and bath mats. The most popular towel qualities are both sided loop formed with cotton yarn woven with the help of two sets of warp with bobby and jacquard shedding the decoration popular for towel is jacquard designs, fancy borders, printed towels on one side.
The towel range includes piece dyed, micro cotton towels, 2 ply combed yarn piled towels, yarn dyed jacquard and
piece dyed stripes.
Home Textiles hold excellent growth potential as urban living calls for high per capita requirement of home textiles basedon field survey of 100 apartments and their usage of textiles in home furnishing.
The table is the basic representation of the fabric consumption for furnishing in an upper middle class section of living. Concluding the significance of textiles, an average upper middle class living certainly acquires a considerate amount of textiles apart from apparels for the customization and furnishing variations. Fabrics and their variety not only provide a style statement but also improvised the basic standard for trend and forecast.
