What Is Heathered Fabric?

How is heathered fabric made?

Heathered fabric is made by combining fibres of two or more colours before they are spun, then knitting or weaving the resulting yarn. Because each yarn already holds several colours, the finished cloth shows small flecks of each one.

The cotton-system route

Cotton Incorporated’s technical bulletin on spun yarns describes the drawing stage, where several slivers (soft, untwisted ropes of fibre) are fed together and drawn out into one. If one or more of those slivers contains dyed fibre, the result is a heather blend. The same step is used to mix fibre types: the bulletin’s example combines four cotton slivers with four polyester slivers of the same linear density to make a 50/50 draw blend. Fibres can also be mixed earlier, at the blending stage, which the bulletin calls an intimate blend.

The woollen route

Wool cloth reaches the same effect by dyeing the fibre before spinning. The Harris Tweed Authority describes its cloth as “dyed in the wool”: separately dyed wools are blended to set recipes, and a single yarn can combine several colours to reach one shade. The sequence it lists is dyed, blended, carded, spun, warped, woven, finished, examined and stamped. Harris Tweed is one named example of a heather-style mixture in tweed.

What are the properties of heathered fabric?

Heathered fabric takes its warmth, stretch, drape and care needs from the fibres in the blend and from how it is knitted or woven; the word heather describes only how it looks. A heathered cotton jersey behaves like cotton jersey, and a cotton and polyester heather behaves like that blend.

Cotton Incorporated names fleece wear and underwear as uses of heather yarn. In those knits, the spinning system also changes the feel. The same bulletin lists ring-spun yarn as the softest and generally more hairy, and open-end yarn as having a harsher hand (feel) but fewer imperfections.

How does heathered fabric appear on a clothing label?

On a US label, heathered fabric is identified by its fibres, not by the word heather. Under 16 CFR 303.16(a), the required label information is:

• the generic names and percentages by weight of the fibres in the product;
• the name or registered identification number (RN) of the manufacturer or of another business marketing or handling the product;
• the country where the product was processed or manufactured.

“Heather grey” on a swing tag or product page is a colour description, and it tells you nothing about the fibres. A heather grey T-shirt can be all cotton or a cotton and polyester blend, and only the fibre content line tells you which. Read the care label for the same reason: care follows the fibres, not the colour.

How do you tell good heathered fabric from poor heathered fabric?

Good heathered fabric shows an even scatter of flecks with no repeating bands, and its label tells you exactly which fibres made them. Three checks help.

1. Look for bars. Lay the garment flat and view both sides from several angles, looking along the rows of knitting. Cotton Incorporated describes barré as an unintentional, repeating pattern of bars or stripes, usually running along the courses (rows) in circular knits. Its listed causes include poor blending of fibre before spinning and mixing yarns with different blend levels.
2. Hold it to the light. The same bulletin says viewing fabric with a light source behind it shows whether barré is physical, meaning a difference in the yarn or knit, rather than a dye difference.
3. Look at a single yarn. In cloth dyed in the wool, such as Harris Tweed, one yarn carries several colours. Find a loose end at a seam allowance and look at it closely.

Where the maker names the spinning system, ring-spun yarn points to a softer hand than open-end yarn, according to Cotton Incorporated.

Is heathered fabric sustainable?

Whether heathered fabric is sustainable depends on its fibres and how they were produced, not on the heather effect. A heather can be a single fibre in two colours, as in all-wool Harris Tweed, or a blend of different fibre types.

Blends matter at the end of a garment’s life. The European Environment Agency notes that design choices, including mixing natural fibres with cheaper synthetic ones, are often given priority over design for recycling. It links this to almost one third of textile waste being unsuitable for fibre-to-fibre recycling, citing Köhler and colleagues (2021). The agency also says products should state whether they are pure or mixed, because recycling processes have different input requirements. For a wider view, see sustainable fashion.