Two Fridays ago, the US Embassy's Community Liaison Officer (the CLO) organized a trip to the local textile factory, Utexrwa. It was amazing! My favorite segment on Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood was always the scenes from inside a factory--the crayon company being a classic example. The Science Channel now has a show I love called "How it's Made," that walks through the prduction of various things--golf tees, stainless steel sinks, Airstream campers, etc.
But Utexrwa was real life and so fasinating. They make both silk and cotton cloth. They also do dying and silkscreening, and (my favorite) they have a huge sewing production room. The company has a deal with a designer that works with Macy's; they manufacture bags from the cloth they produce at Utexrwa that are sold at Macy's at fair prices--the brand is called Fair Winds Trading. They also collaborated to make Obama bags!
I took pictures until my camera battery died about halfway through; but I did get a short video of the silk worms selecting a spot to spin their cocoons. You can find more pictures and descriptions from the first half of the tour in the Utexrwa set in my Rwanda collection on Flickr. For hte play by play, read on...
We started out with silk production. They raise silk works in a special nursery. The worms eat only Mulberry leaves for 24 days straight. Then they settledown and spin their cocoons. It is necessary to heat-kill the moths before they emerge to get the thread in tact. Then the cocoons are sorted by hand, and unravelled by some ingenious machines. The skeins of silk threads are washed by hand. Each cocoon produces a singe thread that is 1,500 meters long.
It unbelieveable. The threads look like hair. I asked one of the managers if the silk thread is fragile, and he reminded me that woven together they make parachutes, so not too delicate a thing.
The skeins are either packaged by hand and sold to other factories for cloth productions, or they can be wound onto spools and used in house on the hand- or power-looms to produce silk cloth.
I thought that they just made silk, but then we moved onto cotton. They start with the bales of cotton picked from the fields, and then clean it and fluff it.
It can remain pure cotton or it can be mixed with polyester fibers. The cotton goes through a number of machines that pull and combine the fibers to make one stong continuous thread.
After stretching and joining a number of times, the resulting cotton thread is wound onto individual spools. The individual threads are then rolled onto large spindles, and from there each thread is meticulously threaded by hand through the eye of metal spokes (I should note at this point that it's quite likely that all my terminology is far from correct, but it's at least descriptive).
The racks of metal spokes are brought into the weaving room where the cotton fabric is woven on power looms.
The noise is deafening. The looms can be set to create various patterns on the cloth. Each cloth has exactly one thread in a a precise number of spokes; if it's off by even one or two, threads are strategically selected out and removed from the loom through a series of hooks and eyes.
The cotton cloth is then inspected by men using a large light box and a set of rollers--it rolls off one and onto another roll until a defect is found. The defective area is cut out of the cloth then a new roll is started. The cloth from there is either dyed, or printed using silkcreens, or both. The printed materials use large aluminum drums that have a single color of the printed pattern etched into them chemically. That allows you to create a multi-color print, one color at a time.
At any point in production, the textiles can be sold or they can keep working their way through Utexrwa, and ultimately make their way to the sewing production room. Pieces are cut from the cloth and row after row of women sit sewing away on industrial sewing machines. I must have had the biggest grin on my face--I used the minimal Kinyarwanda to say good afternoon, ask how they were, and wish them a good weekend. They were delighted to respond and I felt a real connection with them for the brief time I could stay.
There was also a hand screen printing area where they were printing Primus beer banners, and individually numbered moto-taxi driver vests. In another area, high tech sewing machines were embroidering birds onto school shirts. The men at the computers running the emboidery machines laughed hard when I explained (usign a lot of hand gestures) that it can take me days to hand stich a single little bird.
From there we were given sodas in the boardroom and provided some silk and cotton products for purchase at very reasonable prices. Unfortuantely all the Macy's prototypes were off limits, but you can bet I will be looking for them at stores when I get home.
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