These wonderful qualities give manmade materials a huge range of different uses. They make our everyday life easier and in many professions synthetic materials can even save lives. These materials are also much cheaper in production than usual natural fibers that take a lot of time and efforts to be made. But not all qualities of manmade materials are that great and sometimes it is necessary to have better fabric characteristics.
For getting higher quality of fabrics different sorts of fibers are mixed together. This is probably the most important one of all purposes of blending. But there are also other purposes of blending, for example, different sorts of natural fibers can be mixed to improve aesthetic of final fabric.
Such purposes of blending were met by a man even at the beginning of fabrics weaving. These decorative purposes of blending lead to a very interesting combination and appearance of very beautiful materials. Blended fabrics were very hard to produce at first, that`s why they were meant for kings. But then industrial revolution and modern achievement of technology made the process of blending much cheaper, and nowadays such fabrics are available for everyone.
Technically the process of blending is not that simple, first of all, the filament are suited for blending. Longer filaments are much harder to handle while blending, so they are not used. Usually these longer filaments are cut into shorter filaments that are called staple fibers. On the other hand, many natural fibers (wool, for example) are already short and can be used for blending as they are.
Another important thing is the sort of fibers for blending. As long as properties of different fibers can vary greatly, not all combinations of fibers are possible. Usually different natural and synthetic fibers are blended together to achieve better qualities of both natural and synthetic materials (not all qualities of natural fibers can be replicated in synthetic material even with modern level of technology). Out of all synthetic fibers polyester is probably the most widely used one.
Thanks to its wonderful qualities, polyester is just the best fiber for blending. And being mixed with cotton, for example, polyester produces a fabric that is very easy to take care of. That is why so many shirts and sportswear are made of this interesting combination of materials. These days each piece of clothing made of mixture of different materials has a special label with percentage of each material it contains and special recommendations on caring for this product (different fibers has to be treated differently).