Web Evaluation: Fabric Construction (wovens & knits)

Evaluate 2 web sites on the same topic. You should evaluate these based on the criteria listed on the University of British Columbia Library handout. If you have lost the handout, this information can be found at http://www.library.ubc.ca/home/evaluating/ You should write a one to two paragraph evaluation on each of the web sites. This assignment should not exceed 2 pages, double spaced, and should be placed in your folio.

http://www.voguefabricsstore.com/store/home.php

The website for Vogue Fabrics offers a variety of goods and services dealing with everything fabrics. It is complete with information about the business and its background, goods and services they offer, store locations, sales events, FAQ’s, contact information and even being able to be part of their mailing list to receive the latest deals. There is also a tab to be able to purchase fabric on their website. Their business carries a variety of fabrics including woven and knits. The array of woven includes plain and complex weaves to ones with Lycra for some stretch and an assortment of knits are also sold such as jersey knits, knit suiting, knit prints, novelty designer knits and more. With each fabric searched-- in this case, a woven or a knit—the website will provide you the product group, detail description of the fabric and product specials. For example, a woven:

Product Group: Couture Knit Jersey

Detail Description: “Couture Jersey is a knit fabric with a nice crepe texture and a fluid soft hand. Can be used for all forms of garments from pant suits to tops, wraps, and dresses. A great knit for all uses. 95% polyester 5% spandex. 60" wide. Machine washable cool. line dry. Priced per yard.”

The website does not have any floating ads all around each window page and provides easy to follow tabs to get where you need to, including a search bar tool. Lastly, the website encourages any questions or concerns to be emailed to them and promises to try and reply within a day or so, privacy policies and also has a copyright date of 2009.

http://www.ahfa.us/uploads/documents/woven.pdf

This link takes us to a fifty-page standard and guidelines on woven and knit residential upholstery fabric. The author is the Joint Industry Fabric Standards Committee formed back in the 70’s. It was published back in June ’94 and claims to have been reviewed and updated since then. The guidelines claim to serve as a valuable tool in the textiles industry to benefit the producers and consumers. The guidelines provide guidelines for refinement, performance criteria, and test methods.

This link presents a list of participating member companies, institutions and associations. The table of contents is organized with columns for charateristic or property, reference and chapter, along with the current issue.

According to their standard and guidelines:

Standard -- The performance or characteristic of an upholstery fabric that can be measured using widely accepted test methods and test apparatus. Criteria established is necessary for predicting the performance of an upholstery
fabric.

Guidelines -- That property or characteristic of an upholstery fabric that cannot be measured using widely accepted test methods and test apparatus. It shall be understood that if numerical values are used as guidelines herein, they shall be considered to be "recommendations only" as variations in the magnitude and/or accuracy of these numerical values may represent vagaries of the test method or test apparatus.