Materials

Piña Fiber

Pineapple, Ananas comosus, is an herbaceous plant with long, narrow, fairly stiff leaves with margins usually spiny except in few varieties.
The Piña fiber is extracted from the leaves of the pineapple plant. In particular the native variety which yield excellent fi-ber that can be spun into threads to make a shimmering soft fabric.

There are 2 ways of extracting the fibers from the leaves before it can be made into fabrics:


1. Hand Stripping/scrapping – this process utilizes broken por-celain plate, coconut shell, plastic comb and seashells where leaves are stripped manually by pulling or scrapping the fiber away of the Spanish or native variety pineapple.
After scrapping the fibers, they are washed thoroughly with tap water and air dried.

2. Decortication – A more refined process that uses a motorized machine with blades to scrape off the pulp in order to separate the fiber. This utilizes the pineapple leaves where fruits were already harvested. The leaves are fed manually in decorticating machine where they are beaten and scraped by the revolving blades. Decorticated fibers are washed thoroughly with water and sun dried.

After extraction and subsequent drying in the open air, the fibers are waxed to remove any entanglements and then they are knotted one by one to form a continuous yarn for weaving into fabric. The fibers are hand spun into ivory-white colored and naturally glossy fabric. As the fiber is fine and breaks eas-ily, working with piña is really slow and tedious.


The piña cloth, considered as special fabric, is used by embroiderers and designers for high end products. It can also be handwoven with other fibers such as silk, cotton, etc…
Aside from being versatile and elegant, this natural fiber is also friendly to the environment and society. It is a renewable re-source and carbon neutral. During processing, it generates mainly organic wastes and leaves residues that can be used to generate electricity or make ecological housing material. At the end of the life cycle, it is biodegradable.
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Bamboo Fiber

The bamboo fiber is made from the starchy pulp of bamboo plants. This textile fiber is fabricated from natural bamboo and other additives. Bamboo fiber is a regenerated cellulose fiber, which is produced from bamboo pulp, processed from bamboo culms. It looks like cotton in its un-spun form. Bamboo fiber is thinner as compared to hair and has a round and smooth surface which makes it abrasion proof.

There are two ways to process bamboo to make the plant into a fabric: mechanically or chemically. But in both ways the raw bamboo has to be split to get bamboo strips. 
After that, bamboo fiber is extracted either through chemical or mechanical processing. The mechanical way is by crushing the woody parts of the bamboo plant and then use natural enzymes to break the bamboo walls into a mushy mass so that the natural fibers can be mechanically combed out and spun into yarn. This is essentially the same eco-friendly manufacturing process used to produce linen fabric from flax or hemp. Bamboo fabric made from this process is sometimes called bamboo linen. Very little bamboo linen is manufactured for clothing because it is more labor intensive and costly.

Chemically manufactured bamboo fiber is a regenerated cellulose fiber similar to rayon or modal. Chemically manufactured bamboo is sometimes called bamboo rayon because of the many similarities in the way it is chemically manufactured and similarities in its feel and hand. Chemical way is basically hydrolysis alkalization. The crushed bamboo is "cooked" with the help of Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) which is also known as caustic soda or lye into a form of regenerated cellulose fiber. Hydrolysis alkalization is then done through carbon disulfide combined with multi phase bleaching. Although chemical processing is not environmental friendly but it is preferred by many manufacturers as it is a less time consuming process.
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Abaca Fiber

It is the most valuable of all fibres for cordage, the product of Musa textilis (family Musaceae). This fibre is also known in the trade as manila and manila hemp, but abaca is a hard fibre and is entirely different from true hemp, which is a soft fibre.

1yr old abaca plant

The abaca plant bears a strong resemblance in appearance to banana. However, compared to banana, the stalks of abaca are more slender and its leaves are narrower and more pointed. It flowers when about two years old, at which stage it is in the most favourable condition for the production of fibre. The stalk is then cut down, and the outer fibre-bearing layer of each successive leaf stem is stripped off in the form of ribbons, known as "tuxies." The tuxies are pulled under a knife that is pressed against a block of wood by means of a bamboo spring. This scraping process removes the pulp and other waste material, leaving the cleaned fibre in the hands of the operator. The cleaned fibre
 has only to be hung up to dry in the open air, when, without further treatment, it is ready to be graded and baled for shipment. A small machine that is an adaptation of the hand cleaning process is used rather extensively in the Philippines. In operating this machine, the tuxie is looped around a revolving wooden spindle, which draws it under the stripping knife. Large automatic machines, of the same type as the sisal-cleaning machines, are used for cleaning abaca fibre in Indonesia and in countries of Latin America.

The quality or grade of abaca fibre is determined by the part of the stalk from which the fibre is obtained, by the amount of serration of the stripping knives and the degree of tension holding the knife against the block, and by prompt and careful drying of the fibre. The outer sheaths of the abaca stalk contain a rather short, strong but discolored fibre; the middle sheaths produce a fibre of medium colour and good strength, the sheaths near the centre of the stalk have a very white, fine fibre of medium strength.
In the process of cleaning abaca fibre, the use of coarsely serrated stripping knives and the lack of proper tension on the stripping knife result in the production of coarse low-grade fibre. Delay and carelessness in drying affect both the colour and the strength of the fibre.

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