Flannel is a soft woven fabric, of varying fineness. Flannel was originally made from carded wool or worsted yarn, but is now often made from either wool, cotton, or synthetic fiber. Flannel is commonly used to make tartan clothing, blankets, bed sheets, sleepwear, and several other uses.
Flannel shirts are often plaid.
Red Flannel Skirt, designed by Sybil Connolly in 1957
Carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibres to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passing the fibres between differentially moving surfaces covered with "card clothing", a firm flexible material embedded with metal pins. It breaks up locks and unorganised clumps of fibre and then aligns the individual fibres to be parallel with each other. In preparing wool fibre for spinning, carding is the step that comes after teasing.
Dyed wool being carded with a 1949 Tatham carding machine at Jamieson Mill, Sandness, Shetland, Scotland.
Cotton carder (known as dhunuri or lep wallah) in Howrah, Kolkata, India
A "Cotton carder". An old engraving copied from artist Pierre Sonnerat's 1782 illustration.
Carding machine