I just bought a shirt at a thrift store. I didn’t want a pure polyester shirt, cause it’s 95 F outside. The shirt didn’t have a fabric list label, but it seemed like an Indian-style shirt – short sleeves and not designed to be tucked in. It also seemed new, since it had a printed cardboard tag attached with a plastic wire.
So is there any way to determine if the fabric is cotton, polyester or silk?
I do have an ancient 40 power binocular microscope. And I have some matches.
More back story:
I mention silk, because once at home I looked closer at the cardboard tag. One side was in English in a hard-to-read font, the other in a hard-to-read asian alphabet. The English side says:
Prathammakant Local Goods Center
79/2 - 3 RUENROM RD. KHON KAEN THAILAND
And it gives an phone #, a fax #, and email address (not sure I can read the email addy) I did a search for the shop name, and about the only hit was an article from a Philippines web magazine from 2010.
An excerpt: We only had one destination – the Prathammakant Local Goods Center, the repository of some of the best Thai silks in Khon Kaen. It’s a one-storey building with a Thai-style wooden roof that has a pointed corner and reddish clay shingles to keep out the rain. The center houses what I can honestly say are some of the best silk cloths I have ever seen. I almost went berserk with the variety and colors of silk cloth for sale. And the prices…
The fabric doesn’t look like typical thin shiny silk. It’s woven with aqua thread and has closely-spaced thicker maroon bars. A little like corduroy, but the bars are broken up every inch or so. Pretty heavy for a summer garment.
Sorry I don’t have a GQ answer, but I used to love those ultra-thin lightweight wildly colored polyester shirts that were all the rage back in the 1970’s, and I wish I could still get them. They were featherweight light, yet kept me toasty warm in cold weather. I wish I had bought a lifetime supply when I could.
One quick and dirty method to figure out fabric content (I have to do this often on upholstery fabric because a lot of the rolls don’t have accurate tags on them) is to get a couple of threads and put a bit of flame to them. Polyester will get melty and stick to itself, cotton will burn quite thoroughly and silk will likewise burn but it smells kind of funny–if you’ve ever burned spider web you’ll recognize it. Rayon is also a possibility and the flame test on rayon will result in a burn since it’s cellulose rather than melting.
Thank you, although it has never occurred to me to burn spider webs — they’re so insubstantial. I have burned tent caterpillar nests, but don’t recalled the aroma, and which probably smells very different due to the many living bodies. I guess I’ll try to find a thick, fairly non-dusty, abandoned web on a non-flammable surface and have a whiff.
And would cotton-poly blend combine the burn characteristics? A bit melty with some actual burning?
DPRK: How might I know if it was or was not linen? Linen wrinkles a lot and sometimes feels a little waxy?
Reply: I’m not completely sure how water affects cotton vs poly. Presumably poly is much less absorbent, but I haven’t followed the field, and thought perhaps those clever scientists had altered poly’s characteristics in that regard over the last 30 years. I guess I’ll find a pure poly garment and run some water over it. Thank you for the suggestion.
You don’t seem to be in the textile business, such that it is important for you to know which fabric the shirt is made of. You don’t really care what it’s made of, do you? You simply want to know if it will be comfortable in hot weather.
Why not just try wearing it? You already bought it, - it’s not still in the store and you’re trying to decide whether or not to buy it. What have you got to lose?
True, except that if it’s silk you’re supposed to follow a lot of inconvenient laundry protocols. I was hoping to have a nice looking everyday shirt. (More back story: I’m currently working on the U.S. Census, and just have 3 appropriate shirts — short sleeved with a pocket and, hopefully, respectable but not boring — so they get washed often. I try to avoid high maintenance clothes.)
Poly-cotton blends are a crapshoot but yeah, you’ll still get some meltiness if the blend is 50/50 or weighted toward polyester.
And silk is absolutely washable–I have a tendency to collect silk men’s shirts from thrift stores because silk is something women love and would love their men to wear so they buy their guys silk shirts. Guys tend to really hate silk so they throw it in the Goodwill bag as fast as they can get away with. I’ve had upwards of 20 silk shirts at a time, usually bought for about five bucks each. They’re absolutely amazing to wear underneath something heavier in cold weather, they have disproportionate insulating ability for no weight or bulk and wearing one under a wool sweater cuts down on the itch factor considerably.
Anyway, silk you wash in cold water and the trick is to only dry it for like ten minutes on medium heat and take it right out of the dryer when it might still be a little bit dampish then hang it to avoid wrinkles. If it gets wrinkly anyway, just mist it with a bit of plain water and wave it around to dry it and the wrinkles will fall right out. Silk is lovely. It always has a distinctive smell though, if you wear it a lot you’ll learn to recognize it.
For the poly shirts I have, dabbing them under the sink for half a second just makes the water kinda bead and roll off, almost as though it were waxed. Cotton just absorbs the water and becomes a dark spot. I have never been fancy enough to knowingly wear silk, so I dunno how that behaves.
Though maybe that’s the result of the weave rather than fabric, or perhaps some sort of coating? I am not entirely sure, and this may have been nothing but superstition on my part… sorry if so!
Another big difference is that poly fabric will bond with oil of any kind and make a permanent stain–that’s mostly what causes “ring around the collar,” body oils bonding permanently with poly fabric. Oily stains will wash out of cotton. Eventually.
Wow, if you’re not in marketing, you should be. It’s 9:30 p.m. and yet I was siezed with an urge to hit the thrifts stores RIGHT NAAOWW to look for anything silk.
DOO EET!!! You weel fall in luff! Silk shirts make amazing nightgowns too, especially if you’re handy and remove the buttons and sew the front plackets together. I bless the polyester sensitivity that requires I wear only natural fibers because I’ve found some amazing fabrics. Like a hemp/silk blend, that stuff was amazing. Only found it the once (not that I’ve really looked recently but never seen it in general use) and bought all I could afford of the stuff and made it up into several garments. Fabulous hand to it and wicks moisture like crazy.
