Loom State
Unprocessed cloth direct from production machinery represents the intermediate commodity traded between spinning mills and wet processing houses. Transactions involving greige goods establish base yardage and target weight prior to scouring, bleaching, dyeing, or printing. Raw material at this stage retains natural fiber impurities and warp sizing agents applied during preparatory beaming.
Trade rules bind deliverable yardage to loom-state specifications rather than finished dimensions.
Sizing Residue
Warp yarns carry protective coatings of starch or polyvinyl alcohol applied to withstand loom abrasion. In greige goods, this added chemistry accounts for five to fifteen percent of raw fabric mass. Processors evaluate desizing difficulty through iodine spot testing and water solubility checks before committing fabric to continuous scour lines.
Hot wash ranges break down sizing compounds to prepare base yarns for uniform chemical uptake.
Visual Inspection
Commercial grading protocols evaluate fabric defects across lighted inspection frames before goods leave the mill shed. Standardized four-point inspection routines tally slubs, broken warp ends, missing picks, and oil spots per hundred square meters. Defect counts determine penalty points calculated against mill contracts.
Classifying fabric below contract thresholds shifts the delivery into secondary quality at substantial price discounts. Machine oil droplets require solvent spot cleaning prior to warehouse dispatch to prevent permanent fixing during thermal finishing. Tension variations during loom cycles leave visible starting marks or reed lines that downstream wet processing cannot disguise.
Width measurements taken across the roll profile verify that raw dimensions accommodate planned shrinkage allowances during subsequent finishing baths. Packaging specifications demand poly-wrap bundling to protect the dry cloth from ambient soot and warehouse moisture. Detailed roll logging provides buyers with traceable defect maps for cut-order planning.
Finishing Route
Downstream processing paths dictate specific physical tolerances for incoming raw goods. Mercerization requires uniform cotton maturity, whereas direct printing demands fabrics completely devoid of sizing residuals or hydrophobic spinning waxes. Technicians perform initial width and weight assays to adjust bath chemistry for shrinkage and mass loss during scouring.
Unstable raw fabric properties cause costly processing failures across continuous bleaching ranges.