page_title: Bamboo textile
section_title: Mechanically-produced fine bamboo fiber
hierarchical_section_title: Bamboo textile / Different forms of bamboo-derived fiber / Mechanically-produced fine bamboo fiber
caption_attribution_description: English: During the festival season May-June every year devotees throng to Akkare-Kottiyoor temple, which is closed for the other eleven months. Odappu, a "flower" made of bamboo pieces instantly is a thing every devotee buys from the temple to his home to be hung there for a year. Here is a shop selling the same.
context_page_description: Bamboo textile is any cloth, yarn or clothing made from bamboo fibres. While historically used only for structural elements, such as bustles and the ribs of corsets, in recent years different technologies have been developed that allow bamboo fibre to be used for a wide range of textile and fashion applications.
  Examples include clothing such as shirt tops, pants, sock for adults and children as well as bedding such as sheets and pillow covers. Bamboo yarn can also be blended with other textile fibres such as hemp or spandex. Bamboo is an alternative to plastic that is renewable and can be replenished at a fast rate.
  Modern clothing labeled as being made from bamboo is usually viscose rayon, a fiber made by dissolving the cellulose in the bamboo, and then extruding it to form fibres. This process removes the natural characteristics of bamboo fibre, rendering it identical to rayon from other cellulose sources.
context_section_description: Some bamboo fibre is made by a mechanical-bacterial process similar to retting flax into linen fibre. In this way, the woody part of the bamboo is crushed mechanically before a natural enzyme retting and washing process is used to break down the walls and extract the fibre. This bast fibre is then spun into yarn. In fine counts the yarn has a silky touch. The same manufacturing process is used to produce linen fabric from flax or hemp. Bamboo fabric made from this process is sometimes called bamboo linen. The natural processing of litrax bamboo allows the fibre to remain strong and produce a high quality product. This process gives a material that is very durable.
  Another means of extracting fibre from bamboo, and probably the only purely mechanical process of extraction anywhere in the world, is practiced in the days preceding the annual festival of the Kottiyur Temple of Kerala, India. The handcrafted bamboo artifact, known locally as "odapoovu" is in the form of a tuft of  white fibres of up to a foot in length. The article is made out of newly emerging bamboo culms of the reed bamboo endemic to the region (Ochlandra travancorica), which go through a process of alternating pounding with stones and retting in water lasting several days, followed by a combing to remove the pith, leaving the cream white fibres and a stub of the bamboo. The fibre is too coarse and the process very cumbersome, to be of much use in making fine yarn, thread or textiles.
caption: Tufts of retted bamboo fibers for sale at Kottiyoor Temple in Kerala.
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