What is the process for making hemp clothing? What part of the plant is used?

Question

What is the process for making hemp clothing? What part of the plant is used?

Answer 1

The Hemp fiber is one of the most valuable parts of the hemp plant.

It is commonly called bast, which refers to the fibers that grow on the outside of the woody interior of the plant's stalk, and under the most outer part (the bark).

Bast fibers give the plants more strength, which is especially true with the hemp plant.

Hemp fibers can be 3 feet (0.91 m) to 15 feet (4.6 m) long, running the length of the plant.

Depending on the processing used to remove the fiber from the stem, the hemp naturally may be creamy white, brown, gray, black or green.

The use of hemp for fiber production has declined sharply over the last two centuries, but before the industrial revolution, hemp was a popular fiber because it is strong and grows quickly; it produces 250% more fiber than cotton and 600% more fiber than flax when grown on the same land.

The cut hemp is laid in swathes to dry for up to four days. This was traditionally followed by retting, either water retting (the bundled hemp floats in water) or dew retting (the hemp remains on the ground and is affected by the moisture in dew moisture, and by molds and bacterial action). Modern processes use steam and machinery to separate the fibre, a process known as thermo-mechanical pulping.

Retting is a stage in the manufacturing of vegetable fibers, especially the bast fibers. It is a process that employs water and microbial action to separate the bast fibers from the woody core (the xylem), and sometimes from the epidermis as well.

In "water retting", plant stems such as flax, jute, hemp or kenaf are submerged in water, and soaked for a period of time to loosen the fibers from the other components of the stem. Retting can also be done by letting the cut crop stand in the fields in the wet Fall, called "dew retting". In either approach, bacterial action attacks pectin and lignin, freeing the cellulose fibres.

The stems must be monitored during retting to avoid excessive degradation of the fibres, making it a very labor-intensive process.

Once retting is complete, the stems are then removed and washed, where they are typically subjected to mechanical processing to remove the soft tissue and then dried so that all that remains are the fibres.

These fibers are then used for cloth weaving .

Hemp has been used to make paper.

From = wikipedia