| Colored cotton, born with natural color, whose products don't require dying process, is a new kind of environmentally friendly fiber. So the research on colored cotton products will bring us ecological, economical and social benefits.In this paper, trough studying the effect of different fibers and softening technics, we aimed at developing the colored cotton knitted products with excellent wearing properties and hand feel.We choosed eight colored cotton blended yarns and tested their tensile property, bending rigidity, twist, hairiness, moisture regain and evenness. The results showed that except for the blended yarn containing cashmere with low strength and poor evenness, the others could basically meet the requirements of worsted knitted yarns.Treated by cellusoft L, three softening agents or cellusoft L→softening agent, colored cotton blended knitted fabrics were tested by some wearing properties, through which the best method of softening was decided. Conclusions were got: cellusoft L gave the fabrics great hygroscopicity and soft hand at the cost of fabric weight, strength, and the color became dull; contrarily, with no loss of weight and strength, three softening agents especially CYR-302 could reduce the bending length more effectively than cellusoft L, and the fabric color was brighter; through the treatment of cellusoft L→CYR-302, it not only weakened the loss of the weight, strength and color change, but also provided the fabrics with optimal hand feel. All in all, we used the third one as the best way of softening.Eight blended yarns were knitted to be jersey and interlock, which were finished by the process of preparation, the softening(cellusoft L→CYR-302) and heat setting. Then the wearing properties of different fabrics were measured. Through comparison and analysis, we got the conclusions as follows. Because of the existence of new fibers like tencel, milk except for cashmere, the strength of yarns and fabrics was increased, which improved the fabric durability. The wet permeability and air transmission of colored cotton blended fabrics had a close relationship, and those two properties of the fabrics containing new fibers are similar to the brown/white-cotton blended ones. The properties of pliability, drapability and crease-resistance were evidently improved with the existence of the above new fibers. Both soft and firm hand feel made colored cotton blended fabrics have ideal appearance retention.Through the test of pilling by Martindale we got the results as follows. The pilling performance got worse when the colored cotton was blended with the new fibers especially cashmere, tencel and milk. The increase of yarn hairiness, twist and unevenness also had severe effect on pilling, while the glossing by cellusoft L could greatly improve this performance. On the precondition of assuring soft hand, the fuzzing and pilling could also be abated by increasing the fabric density and interweaving colored cotton with PTT filaments.Finally we tried to use KES system to make objective evaluation on the hand feel of fabrics. 14 mechanical parameters on the tensile, bending, shearing, compression and surface characters measured by KES, and two physical parameters are converted into handle values (HV) by computation. The comprehensive hand feel was reached by using the method of gray relational analysis. The results indicated that the fabric treated by the way of cellusoft L→CYR-302 boasted the softest hand, which was consistent with the subjective evaluation from a group of experts. The gray relational analysis also showed that when the content of colored cotton was raised and the content of new fibers especially tencel, modal and milk was more than or equal to 50%, the colored cotton blended knitted fabrics would have better hand feel.
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