How to wash your Handloom Cotton Fabric - Folksmarket.com

Hey folks! In our last blog, we have briefly touched upon the 4 ways to care cotton fabric and talked in depth about the cotton, its evolution, its properties, types etc. The reason was to know your fabric before you can start caring about them. Now this piece will briefly touch upon the ways you can wash your cotton fabric.

Normally its not a science. Most of the manufacturers give instructions as how to wash and care for the fabric. Yet they may not be complete for wanting of the space! Its always a good idea to acquaint some basic principles that can be selectively use for different kind of fabric(apparels and furnishing) rather than knowing each and every detail for each and every kind of fabric!

Fabric often gets stained because of greases, oil, waxes, polluted chemicals present in the atmosphere and dyes. The aim of the fabric care, thus is two folds:

1-      Removing the pollutants

2-      Ironing to remove the wrinkles and bring freshness to the fabric

Fabric care is the joint responsibility of you and your cleaning agent.

Washing your Cotton Fabric

A - Spotting the spots

          1-      Identify the area that needs special attention. Usually its    neck, underarms and cuffs that need bit more rubbing. So before washing, check these spots.

         

          2-      Check if the fabric has some embellished (beads, graphics, zari, glitter etc). This area needs to pull inside out while washing.

 

          3-      Categorize your cotton fabric as “All white cotton” or “Dyed cotton”. Dyed cotton can also be thought as printed, graphed etc. Aim is to wash all white cotton and rest of the clothes separately. You can have multiple batching of the clothes depending upon the need.

B - Choose the detergent

           1-      General purpose detergent works well for cotton fabric and most of the fabric. We need to see of there is any scum or leftover on the fabric.

   

           2-      Check whether your detergent is mild or harsh. One good domestic way is to dissolve the recommended (normally given on the wrappers) quantity of detergent in 900 ml of cold water and allow the detergent and water to sit for 24 hours. Note if there is a residue settled in the bottom of the container. Now if it happens, then be sure that these residues are not going to be washed easily and often they will leave the whitish stain on the fabric. They are called as scum.

            3-      Choose the detergent which leaves no such scum. Don’t settle for low quality detergents.

C - Bleaching of white stained Cotton Fabric

One of the important characteristic of cotton fabric is that it can be bleached easily and retain that saints look for years. Hydrogen peroxide is a great bleaching agent. But Chlorine bleach is normally recommended for cotton fabric.

1- Take around 4 liters of semi hot water. Make sure that water is hot enough to clean but not hot enough to damage the fabric. Ideally you should be able to insert your finger to judge that temperature of the water. Mix a cup of dry dishwasher soap and add 1/3 cup of bleaching agent. Ensure that the mixing of this is not taking place in a metal container.

2- Put all the stained white clothes in small batches in this mixture and allow the fabric to soak the bleaching water. Do not agitate or rub at this moment, just allow them to soak.

3- Remove the clothes in 30-40 minutes depending upon the intensity of the stained. In any way not more than 40 minutes.

4- After 30-40 minutes, put the fabric immediately into washing machine without rinsing the bleached fabric. Add some washing detergent, on your washing machine and when its about to reach the rinse cycle add a 2/3^rd of White vinegar (or distilled vinegar or virgin vinegar). Let machine completes its washing. Dry the fabric after wash in clothing lines or washing machine. But make sure that you still put the clothes in clothing lines even if you dried in machine. Sun rays are so essential to fabric! Allow them to breath in fresh air.

5- White vinegar is essentially a distilled form of vinegar that is a mixture of acetic acid and water. It’s a common household, economical liquid and environment friendly. It kills all the bacteria, fungi and moulds from the fabric.

D - Other batch of CottonFabric

            1-  Wash cotton fabric either in machine or hand wash. Use lukewarm water and laundry detergent.

            2-   Irrespective of the fact that you are washing in machine, soak the clothes for 30 minutes in a non metallic container with the detergent.

  

            3-   Rub those spotted stained parts after 30 minutes. It may not be clean but at least you have agitated the dirt agents and they are more likely to adhere with the detergent while washed in a machine.

           4-    While soaking the embellished clothes and fabric pull them inside out. Don’t rub them hard, either don’t rub or rub very very gently.

   

           5-    Make sure that you rinse properly. This consumes more water than that required for washing. So please make sure that you utilize the water. Rinsing is an act of allowing the detergent to wash away taking dirt along.

          6-     Machine dried clothes should also be dried under the sky for a while.

   

    Cotton fabric are breathing fabric, the care as you have seen so far is not difficult. We all wish to care our fabric not only for its durable use but also to get a fresh feel away from pollution every time we wear. So why not we get more out of our efforts and make our fabric safe in our hands!!

For more details, please log in www.folksmarket.com

Kindly contact us at:

folks@folksmarket.com

Handloom Fabric Buyers may find it easier with Folksmarket.com

It is often seen that many B2B clients who are interested in the products and wish to enquire about the same, run through a lot of inconvenience while choosing those products which enticed them.

Problems faced by B2B Fabric Buyers

Most of the websites either have one contact page that asks for detail information like Name, Address, Company Name, Telephone number and a message box every time a product is enquired or the client has to choose for each product one by one, fill in detail and send, again and yet again.

So lets say that if I, as a B2B client, wish to enquire about 10 different fabrics from 4 different sub category, I need to remember the product characteristics, its name going back and forth and then fill in those details followed by the message which may be like “I want to have the sample of Product Code xyz, 200 mtr order of fabric for product code abc, for product code def I have written message as “you said you can produce only 500 mtr in a month, but I am supposed to deliver 500 mtr of finished product in 30 days, how will I be able to work it out?..etc”

The problem faces by the client in such scenario are:

n  Remembering so many product item is such a pain

n  If he clears the hurdle number 1, the next hurdle is remembering the Commercial Specifications that tells about the product capacity, minimum order quantity and expected order time. For 10 products, it look like remembering 30 different piece of information

n  Assuming the user has a sharp memory, he remembers well everything. But again, he needs to fill in the details specific for each product based on its Commercial information.

n  What if suddenly the Boss ask hey Mike, go in for Silk fabric also, we might have a client looking for the best Silk fabrics. Ohh no man, baffled Mike frustrates, ‘how come the boss is so cold to my existing problem of enquiring products. I can’t copy and paste the information because even this exercise I need to do 10 times now 15 times for the same number of different products?? What a pain!!

n  To add to the list of already existing inconveniences, now Silk has a count system different from Cotton and Linen, how the hell am I going to remember the Technical Specifications?

This is a perennial problem faces by almost all the website operating into B2B category. To address such issue, we at Folksmarket.com utilized our tech resource to program in such a way that through one click, any user can enquire for the multiple products.

Uniqueness of www.folksmarket.com

At folksmarket.com, we believe in giving all the information to the client in our website itself that eases out the process. We have divided the fabric section information into 2 parts; Technical Specifications and Commercial Specifications. 

While the Technical Specification educate the client about the Yarn Count, Reed Count, Picks per Inch, Commercial Specifications, on the other hand, indicates what could be the timelines for a specific order to meet. Now with this specific and varied information, it is pertinent for us to develop a system that can allow our prospective clients to enquire for multiple products without the hassle of memorizing any detail. 

Add to Enquiry System of folksmarket.com

Our client can send us the enquiry through two easy yet effective steps:

1-      Sign up first; it just takes around 100 seconds.

2-      Starts browsing through different products/fabrics, read all the details, choose the items he wishes to enquire about and keep on adding there itself without leaving the page!!

The Counter System will keep on informing as to how many products they have added so far. Once they are done with, just click on Send an Enquiry, the next page they will be in, displays all the products list wise. Now just fill in details like Order Quantity, Expected Timeline and any message unique for each product. Once they send it to us, we will be in position to know what kind of demand and product our client is interested in. This facilitates in saving lot of time for our fabric buyers.

My Account

What more, all the enquired products are stored in Buyer’s Account which he can refer any time he wishes to. Now this My Account tab is one of the most convenient post enquiry features of www.folksmarket.com. There is a status bar that shows the status of the work as processing, complete, closed. The text box at the end of Enquiry details let you know about the detailed status of the work and payment details. 

Our aim is to minimize the conversation back and forth between us and client about the work. The client may update himself about the work progress at any hour the day.

Customer first

This Enquiry Adding page is the beta version of our Enquiry system. There are many more features that will be added in Add to Enquiry Section and websites as whole. The objective is to increase the status updating conversation between client and Folksmarket.com team. This however does not mean that we don’t believe in communication! We love to speak with our users and clients but just want to save the inconvenience. 

Our team member from Tech Team, Narendra, deserves special accolades. Keep up good work buddy.

(PS: This piece is not written to denigrate other organizations. Aim is simply to highlight the issue )