A comparative study on seam performance of cotton and polyester woven fabrics

This paper presents and compares the seam performance of 12 woven fabrics by means of seam strength, seam efficiency, seam pucker, seam slippage properties, and visual observations. Besides, seam profiles were prepared by using normalized values. Test fabrics, suitable for clothing and lining, having cotton and polyester fibers in content and woven systematically in weft setting and weave structure were utilized and sewn by two different sewing threads. All the evaluations were conducted in terms of weave, weft setting, and sewing thread separately. Experimental results reveal that the cotton fabrics sewn with any kind of sewing thread have similar seam efficiency values. The fabrics stitched with corespun polyester sewing thread show higher seam efficiency values. Despite this, low seam efficiency values were obtained for the polyester fabrics. Seam slippage of 6 mm is over 200 N tensile load for the cotton fabrics. In the case of the polyester fabrics, it is difficult to determine seam slippage because of breakage of the yarns and the sewing threads and stripping problems close to seam line. Especially for polyester fabrics, worse seam pucker properties have been observed as compared with the ones stitched with mercerized cotton sewing thread. Generally, twill fabrics show lower seam pucker values for all types of the test fabrics