Fabric Defect Identification and the Four-Point System

Most garment quality problems are baked in before the first cut, in the fabric roll. A designer who can name the common defects and understands how a roll is graded can reject bad fabric at goods-in instead of discovering it at final inspection, when the cost is a whole cut order. Here is the defect vocabulary and the scoring system that turns it into an accept/reject decision.

The common defects, and how to spot them

Defects split into woven and knit families, plus faults that appear in either.

• Woven - slubs (thick yarn lumps), missing/broken ends or picks (a warp or weft yarn absent), reed marks (vertical streaks from a damaged reed), temple marks, float (a yarn skipping its interlacing).
• Knit - holes and drop stitches, needle lines (vertical streaks from a bent/broken needle), barré (horizontal shade or texture bands), set marks.
• Either - dyeing/shade variation (side-to-side or end-to-end), stains and oil spots, crease marks, contamination (foreign fibre), skew/bow (distorted weft or course line), printing faults (mis-register, smudging).

The eye-training rule: inspect on a backlit inspection frame at a fixed speed and a set viewing distance, because a defect's severity depends on how visible it is at arm's length, not under a microscope.