Abstract

Ramie, one of the oldest textile fibres of plant origin has from time immemorial ruled the textile world as king of natural fibres. Its popularity in the textile world is limited due to the difficulty in degumming and lack of knowledge of mechanical processing. Major natural conventional fibres like cotton, wool, silk and jute are widely used throughout the world. Apart from these, unconventional natural fibres like ramie, pineapple, sisal and hemp are grown in much smaller quantities and have local economic importance. Ramie, a lingo-cellulosic bast fibre obtained by decortication from stem of the plant followed by degumming possesses high α-cellulose and very little lignin. It possesses some advantageous physical and chemical properties while some demerits are encrusting gummy material, cohesiveness. If the apparent demerits can be masked, a diverse range of products can be engineered by exploiting the intrinsic properties of ramie. One of the ways of masking is blending of ramie with different natural fibres in order to achieve the best utilization of the positive attributes and to reduce the negative attributes. Thus, employing the chemical degumming method coupled with the improved spinning technique, blended ramie yarns can be developed for spinning of acceptable yarn qualities. Woven fabrics from ramie-jute were also found satisfactory.