The textile manufacturing process turns fibre into yarn, yarn into fabric, and fabric into a dyed, finished and tested material that a garment or home-textile maker can cut. It runs in nine stages, but not always in the same order: a nonwoven skips the yarn stage entirely, and colour can go in at the fibre, the yarn, the fabric or the finished garment. A worked example carries one cotton shirt fabric through four of the site’s calculators, from yarn count to the fibre a single shirt draws.
The scale is set by fibre. Textile Exchange’s Materials Market Report 2026 (published 22 September 2026) estimates that 139 million tonnes of textile fibre were produced in 2025, up from about 132 million tonnes in 2024. Synthetics made up about 96.2 million tonnes (69%), with polyester alone at 82.5 million tonnes (59%). Plant fibres were about 32.7 million tonnes (23%), of which cotton was 25.7 million tonnes (18%); manmade cellulosic fibres such as viscose were 9.1 million tonnes (7%), and animal fibres about 1%.
The textile manufacturing process at a glance
| Stage | Goes in | Comes out | Read in depth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Fibre production and preparation | Crop, fleece or polymer | Clean staple fibre or filament | cotton ginning; how manmade fibres are made |
| 2. Spinning | Staple fibre | Yarn on a package | yarn spinning; the ring spinning process |
| 3. Yarn preparation | Yarn packages | Cones, sized warp beams, waxed yarn | types of yarn winding; warping systems; sizing |
| 4. Fabric formation | Yarn (or fibre, for nonwovens) | Greige fabric | fabric formation; the basics of weaving; weft and warp knitting compared; how nonwovens are made |
| 5. Pretreatment | Greige fabric | Clean, absorbent fabric ready for colour | fabric wet processing |
| 6. Dyeing and printing | Prepared fabric (or fibre, yarn, garment) | Coloured fabric | fabric dyeing techniques; the textile printing process |
| 7. Finishing | Coloured fabric | Fabric with its end-use properties | textile finishing processes |
| 8. Testing and inspection | Samples and rolls | Test reports, graded rolls | textile testing standards by test; fabric inspection |
| 9. Garment making | Finished fabric | Garments | the garment production process |
The European Commission’s reference document on the textile industry (the Textiles BREF, JRC, January 2023) describes the same chain in its chapter 2, and makes a point worth keeping in mind for stages 5 to 7: wet processing “cannot be defined as a standard sequence of treatments”. It is a set of unit processes that a mill combines to suit the fibre, the fabric and the buyer, and the substrate can be fabric, yarn or loose fibre.
1. Fibre production and preparation
Natural fibres are grown or shorn and then cleaned. Raw cotton is the cleaner fibre: it reaches the spinning mill in compressed bales, and the first operations are mainly dry, sorting, cleaning and blending the fibre in openers. Raw wool is scoured in water, passing through a train of four to eight wash bowls with detergent to remove grease, suint and dirt. Flax is first retted to free the fibre from the stem, and silk is unwound from the cocoon (all from the Textiles BREF, sections 2.3.1 to 2.3.3). Before that, seed cotton goes through a gin, whose roll box separates the lint from the seed (USDA Agricultural Research Service); see cotton ginning.
Manmade fibres are extruded. The BREF (section 2.2) names three ways of forming the filament: melt spinning, used for thermoplastics such as polyester, polyamide and polypropylene; dry spinning, in which the solvent evaporates; and wet spinning, in which the polymer solution is forced into a bath, the route for viscose and acrylic. The filament is used as it is, textured, or cut into staple fibre for spinning on cotton or wool systems. More on how manmade fibres are made.
2. Spinning: fibre to yarn
Spinning gathers staple fibres into a continuous strand and twists it into yarn. On the cotton system, used for cotton and for manmade staple fibre, the fibre is opened and cleaned and then carded, combed (an optional step, used for finer yarns), drawn, made into roving, spun, twisted if required and wound. On the wool system the worsted route combs longer fibres into a fine yarn, while the woollen route only cards shorter fibres before spinning (Textiles BREF, section 2.4).
Spinning lubricants and preparation agents are added along the way; they have to come out again before dyeing, which is why they turn up in the exhaust air or the effluent of the mill that finishes the fabric. The BREF gives about 5% lubricant on woollen-spun fibre and less than 2% on worsted. Go deeper with yarn spinning and the ring spinning process.
3. Yarn preparation
Yarn leaves the spinning frame on small packages, so it is rewound onto large cones. For weaving, the warp yarns are then wound side by side onto a beam (warping) and coated with size, a film of starch or synthetic polymers such as polyvinyl alcohol, to lubricate and protect them through the loom. Knitting yarn is waxed instead, usually with paraffin wax, so that it runs through the needles at speed (Textiles BREF, sections 2.5.1 and 2.5.2).
The size has to be removed again by the finisher, and the BREF puts sizing agents at 30–70% of the chemical oxygen demand in the waste water from finishing woven fabric. See types of yarn winding, warping systems and sizing.
4. Fabric formation: weaving, knitting or nonwoven
Weaving interlaces two sets of yarn at right angles, the warp along the length and the weft across it, on a loom; the BREF notes that the process itself needs only electricity. Knitting forms fabric from loops of yarn, made by needles; weft knitting feeds one continuous yarn across the needles, row by row, on flat or circular machines, and fully fashioned and complete-garment machines shape the piece on the machine so that little or nothing is cut away (Textiles BREF, sections 2.5.1.3 and 2.5.2.2). The BREF puts the needle oil left on knitted fabric at 4–8% of its weight, all of which the finisher washes out.
Nonwovens are the shortcut in the diagram: the BREF defines them as textiles made without an intermediate yarn-processing step. A web of fibres or filaments is laid, by carding, airlaying, wetlaying or spunlaying among other methods, and then bonded thermally, mechanically or chemically (EDANA, how nonwovens are made). Start with fabric formation, then the basics of weaving, shuttle and shuttleless looms compared, weft and warp knitting compared, knit structures and how nonwovens are made. For a whole mill, warehouse to inspection, see a worked mill case study, yarn to fabric.
5. Pretreatment: making greige fabric ready for colour
Fabric off the loom or knitting machine (greige, or grey, fabric) carries size, oils, waxes and the fibre’s own impurities, all of which would block even dyeing. For cotton the Textiles BREF (section 2.6.1) lists five principal operations:
- Singeing burns protruding fibre ends off the surface in a gas flame, followed straight away by a quench bath.
- Desizing removes the warp size, and is usually the first wet operation on a woven fabric. Starch sizes are broken down, most often with amylase enzymes; water-soluble sizes such as PVA need in principle only hot water and sodium carbonate.
- Scouring extracts pectins, fats, waxes and other impurities with alkali and surfactants.
- Bleaching removes the natural colour, most often with hydrogen peroxide.
- Mercerising treats cotton under tension in concentrated caustic soda, about 270–300 g of NaOH per litre for 40–50 seconds, to raise strength, dimensional stability, lustre and dye uptake.
Not every fabric gets every step (desizing applies only to woven fabric), and mills often combine them, for example desizing with cold bleaching in one pass. More on fabric wet processing.
6. Dyeing and printing
Dyeing applies colour evenly through the material; printing applies it in a pattern. The Textiles BREF (section 2.7.2) lists the stages at which colour can go in: loose fibre (stock dyeing), top, tow, yarn, fabric in the piece, and made-up goods such as garments. Synthetic fibres can also be coloured in the polymer before extrusion (dope dyeing). Dyeing runs in batches, where a load is brought to equilibrium with the dye bath over minutes to hours, or continuously, and both routes end with fixation, washing and drying.
Printing uses either pigments or dyes in a thickened paste. A pigment paste carries a binder; the print is dried and usually fixed with hot air, and needs no washing. A dye paste is usually fixed with steam, and the fabric is then washed and dried (Textiles BREF, section 2.8.1). See fabric dyeing techniques and the textile printing process.
7. Finishing
Finishing gives the fabric its end-use properties: appearance, handle, and functions such as water repellency, easy care or flame retardancy. It can be mechanical or chemical. In more than 80% of cases, the BREF says, the chemical finish is applied by padding: the fabric passes through the bath, between squeeze rollers, and is then dried and cured. Padding leaves about 70% of the fabric’s weight in liquor, and minimum-application methods such as kiss-roll, spray and foam about 30% (Textiles BREF, section 2.9.1).
Finishing usually happens as a separate step after dyeing, but not always; pigment dyeing and resin finishing, for instance, can share one bath. More on textile finishing processes.
8. Testing and inspection
Testing runs alongside every stage, not only at the end: the yarn’s count after spinning, for example, and the fabric’s weight, strength, shrinkage and colour fastness once it is finished. Physical and mechanical tests are run on samples conditioned in a standard atmosphere, which ISO 139 defines (ISO 139:2005, amended 2011). Finished rolls are inspected for faults, and lots are accepted or rejected on a sample, often drawn under the sampling plans of ISO 2859-1.
Which method applies to which test, ISO, AATCC or ASTM, is covered in textile testing standards by test; roll grading in fabric inspection.
9. Garment making
The garment maker turns finished fabric into products: patterns are made and graded, laid out in a marker, the fabric is spread and cut, the pieces are sewn, and the garments are pressed, inspected and packed. The stitches that hold them together are classified in ISO 4915 (ISO 4915:1991, stitch types used in hand- and machine-sewn seams). The full sequence is in the garment production process.
The stages are rarely under one roof. A spinner, a weaver or knitter, a dyehouse and a garment factory may sit in different countries; for how two garment-exporting countries compare, see Bangladesh and Vietnam compared.
Worked example: one shirt fabric through the chain
Four of the site’s calculators link up along the process. Each link below opens the calculator with these inputs already entered, so you can change any of them and see the rest move.
| Step | Inputs | Calculator shows |
|---|---|---|
| Yarn: count to linear density (yarn count converter, prefilled) | Ne 40 cotton yarn | 14.76 tex, 132.86 denier, Nm 67.74 |
| Fabric: construction to weight (fabric GSM calculator, prefilled) | 133 ends × 72 picks per inch, Ne 40 × Ne 40, 63 inch wide, crimp 6% and 4%, wastage 2% | 125.47 g/m²; 13.38 kg warp and 7.10 kg weft yarn per 100 m (20.48 kg in all) |
| Garment: fabric per shirt (fabric consumption calculator, prefilled) | 1.55 m of marker per shirt at 1.45 m usable width, 125 g/m², allowances 2% end loss, 4% shrinkage, 2% rejects | 0.30 kg (1.68 m, 1.83 yd) per shirt; 0.28 kg in the marker; allowance factor 1.08 |
| Back to fibre (fibre-to-garment cascade, prefilled) | 0.24 kg of fabric in the shirt; yields 88% spinning, 95% fabric formation, 92% dyeing and finishing, 85% cutting | 0.37 kg of fibre drawn per shirt; waste multiplier 1.53; cumulative yield 65.38% |
How the steps connect. Step 1 converts the count the spinner quotes into tex and denier, the direct count systems; step 2 takes the same Ne 40 straight into the fabric weight, in a common poplin construction, and gives about 125 g/m² for the greige fabric. The 1.55 m marker and 1.45 m width in step 3 are assumptions for illustration, not a standard; your own marker gives the real figure. For simplicity we carry the greige weight forward, although pretreatment and finishing change both the weight and the width. In step 4 the shirt’s 0.24 kg of fabric is 85% of the 0.28 kg the marker holds, so the cascade’s cutting yield of 85% is the marker efficiency; the other three yields are the tool’s defaults, and its cost fields, also left at their defaults, are not used here. Counting step 3’s allowances as cutting loss too would lower the cutting yield to about 79% and raise the fibre to about 0.40 kg.
What the chain shows: a shirt with 240 g of fabric in it draws about 367 g of fibre, because four yields that each look respectable multiply to 65.38%. The cutting room alone books about 304 g of fabric per shirt once end loss, shrinkage and rejects are allowed for. Losses at each stage compound, which is the strongest argument for looking at the whole process rather than one stage at a time.
Questions
How is fabric made?
Most fabric is made in two steps from fibre: the fibre is spun into yarn, and the yarn is woven (two sets of yarn interlaced at right angles) or knitted (one yarn formed into loops). Nonwoven fabric skips the yarn: a web of fibres is bonded directly. The fabric is then pretreated, dyed or printed and finished before it is used.
What is the yarn to fabric process?
Yarn is wound onto cones, then prepared for the fabric-forming machine. For weaving, the warp yarns are wound onto a beam and sized; the loom then interlaces warp and weft. For knitting, the yarn is waxed and fed to the needles. The result is greige fabric, which goes on to pretreatment.
What is the fibre to yarn process?
On the cotton system: opening and cleaning, carding, combing (optional, for finer counts), drawing, roving, spinning and winding. Wool follows the worsted route (combed, long fibres) or the woollen route (carded only). Manmade filament can be used as it is, without spinning from staple.
Is nonwoven fabric made from yarn?
No. A nonwoven is made without an intermediate yarn stage: fibres or filaments are laid into a web and bonded mechanically (for example by needling), thermally or chemically.
What is the sequence of textile wet processing?
For woven cotton a common order is singeing, desizing, scouring, bleaching and mercerising, then dyeing or printing, and finishing. It is not a fixed sequence: the EU Textiles BREF describes the steps as unit processes that mills combine, and some are often merged, such as desizing with bleaching.
At which stage of manufacturing is textile dyed?
At any of several: as loose fibre, as tow or top, as yarn, as fabric in the piece, or as a finished garment. Synthetic fibres can also be coloured in the polymer before extrusion.
How this page is kept
Last verified: 17 October 2026. Fibre production figures come from Textile Exchange’s Materials Market Report 2026 and will be replaced when the next edition appears. Process descriptions, and the process parameters quoted for mercerising, lubricants, size, knitting oil and padding, come from the EU Textiles BREF (Joint Research Centre, January 2023), chapter 2; ginning from the USDA Agricultural Research Service; nonwoven web forming and bonding from EDANA, the nonwovens industry association; standard titles and editions from the ISO catalogue. The worked example uses the site’s own calculators with the inputs shown, and every figure attributed to a calculator was computed with its formula and checked on its page. The parameters are typical ranges reported for European mills, not specifications; your machine maker’s and your buyer’s requirements govern your product. Corrections are welcome through the contact page.
