The Fashion, Home + Interiors line is made up of two main product types: cotton fabrics, known by the suffix TCX (Textile Cotton Extension), and coated paper, known by the suffix TPG (Textile Paper Green).
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The system is used globally in both the fashion industry and in product development. In fact, the cotton swatch card is the most reliable standard used as it's easily reproducible, available, and optimized for consistent color overtime.
Now that most of the variables to viewing the cotton color were removed, the swatch card could now reliably be reproduced and truly be considered a production standard, whereas before it was mostly just considered a design tool.
The following products are the core Fashion, Home + Interiors products used by designers and colorists to build palettes, present mood boards, and communicate color for textile, soft home, and apparel products. They include all 2,310 FHI colors in cotton and each have a slightly different use.
It is the only book that allows you to take the entire cotton library with you. Since it is an accordion-style book, it is also the only book that allows you to view the entire TCX library in one view. Simply pull the pages out and stretch it across a long table. In this way you can see all the red, blues, greens, etc... together, laid out chromatically.
A little later in this chapter we look at the difference between the cotton books and a true standard - the swatch card. along the same lines, but just as importantly is the difference between the cotton books themselves.
The three least expensive cotton books - the Cotton Planner, Cotton Passport and the Chip Set- all have cotton fabric chips that are not removable off the paper. This has a big effect on the color. Think about a single layer of any fabric glued to a white backing. On all but the darkest shades, this will influence the color.
The Cotton Swatch Library is a seven-volume, three-ring binder desktop reference with removable, large-format swatches measuring 2" x 2". Each swatch is made from a double layer of unbacked cotton fabric in removable folders with two pages per folder and 16 colors per page.
The real standard in cotton color standards is the digital designation of that color - the spectral data or reflectance value. (We will discuss spectral data in more depth in the Color Science chapter.)
All but one of the cotton books use a single layer of fabric that is glued to the backing of the paper. This alone would make it different than the swatch card, but when you add the ultraviolet rays, the oils and dirt from handling and other degrading effects from aging that the books are exposed to, you are left with a good reference to know which swatch card to use as a standard, but not the standard itself.
This has been illustrated, for instance, every time a designer has asked for a fluorescent color on synthetic fiber to be matched on cotton. As a rule, synthetic fiber will take dye more saturated, deeper and cleaner than natural fibers. Synthetic yarns, by definition, are much more uniform than natural fibers and the woven or knitted cloth will, in turn, be much more uniform. The dyestuffs and dyeing processes also lend synthetics a more saturated color.
When the color standard is in cotton, humidity will be a major factor in its color. Cotton, being a cellulosic fiber, has a property known as moisture regain, which is its tendency to absorb approximately 8.5% of its weight with the moisture in its environment. All natural fibers exhibit this affect to some degree; synthetics to a much lesser degree.
Temperature will have less of an affect than humidity, but it still must be controlled as a variable. When a cold color standard of cotton fabric is compared to a warm standard of the same color, it will most likely show a different color. The conditioning unit will also expose the standard to 70 degrees for 15 minutes.
This situation can be alleviated by making sure that both the designer/colorist and the mill purchase new books at roughly the same time. The other way, which is a much better solution for several reasons, is to use a cotton swatch card, which is the actual standard. 2ff7e9595c
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