The purposes of this study are to examine how are physical properties and handle of knitted fabrics for baby's undershirt changed by home laundering, and to find out the relationship between the change of fabric specimen due to repeated launderings only and the change of shirts due to repeated wearing/laundering cycles. The results are as follows:
(1) It was found that knitted fabrics became hard to stretch, shear stiffness increased and compressional energy decreased with increasing the number of home launderings. An approximately linear relationship was recognized between the change of the physical properties and the square root of the number of launderings, √N.
(2) An offset effect was recognized in bending and shear properties due to dimensional change by laundering.
(3) “KOSHI”, “HARI” and “SHARI” hand values increase and “FUKURAMI” hand value decreases with launderings.
(4) The change of physical properties and handle of shirt by laundering is smaller than that of fabric specimen. But the changes of shirt in tensile resilience, bending and shear histeresis are same as those of fabric specimen or slightly greater than those of fabric specimen. This might be attributed to wearing. The wearing effect of pile knitted fabric mixed with polyester fibers was recognized in compressional property.
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