Fabric Guide

One of the prime benefits of buying a custom made shirt is the ability to pick out your own fabric. After the skill of the tailor making the shirt, the quality of the fabric is the single most important factor in ensuring a well-made formal shirt.

Fabrics are available in boundless varieties, with equally wide variations in quality. Thus, choosing the right fabric can be an overwhelming process.

To enhance your shopping experience with 16stitches.com and to help you select the perfect fabric for your shirt, we have put together the fabrics manual. This manual will help you know what a fabric feels and looks like without actually touching it.

Fabric Weave

Weaving is the method in which the threads (warp and weft) are put together to make a fabric. The style of the weave plays an important role in not only how the shirt looks but also how it feels against the skin. Not only can the density of the weave be changed but also the way threads interact with each other to give the fabric different texture, feel and look. Below is the description of the fabrics categorized by their weaving technique:

Yarn Characterstics

Sometimes, shirts have a label that says, “60s two ply cotton”. While most people ignore this quality mark, few understand its value. This is the description of the yarn used to make the fabric. The feel and comfort of the fabric depends upon the yarn used to weave it. The characteristics of any yarn can be determined by two factors: Ply and Yarn number.