When I first started writing fabric descriptions for Core Fabrics, I spent an almost absurd amount of time touching fabric. Comparing it. Folding it. Letting it hang. Scrunching it up and smoothing it out again. I was trying to figure out how to talk about fabric in a way that would genuinely help you decide whether it was something you wanted to sew with.
Which immediately raised an uncomfortable question: do these words actually mean anything?
Phrases like buttery-soft, slightly rustic hand, structured but never stiff, springy drape, cool and smooth sound lovely. They also risk being completely meaningless if you haven’t consciously built a relationship with how fabric feels. Without that reference point, they’re just vibes.
And yet, we still needed to use them. Using only words and (beautiful) photographs, we were trying to convey something deeply nuanced, and subjective.
So I compared constantly. I spent hours touching fabrics back to back, noticing small differences, and slowly building my own internal benchmarks. Over time, I learned not just how fabrics felt, but how to translate that feeling into language, and how to connect it back to the way fabric looks online.
That process is what this post is really about. It’s also our way of trying to make online fabric shopping feel a little less intimidating and a lot more intuitive.
Before we go any further, it helps to see how this language tends to cluster. Most fabric descriptors fall into three broad categories. On their own, they’re imperfect. Together, they start to do something more useful.
| Drape (movement) | Hand (touch) | Structure (resistance) |
|---|---|---|
| Fluid – falls into soft, continuous folds (rayon challis, ecovero viscose) | Soft – yields easily to the touch, no resistance (modal jersey, brushed cotton) | Structured – resists collapse, holds clean lines (cotton canvas, bull denim) |
| Flowing – moves readily with the body (tencel twill, viscose crepe) | Smooth – even surface, no texture (sateen, silky poplin) | Crisp – sharp response when folded or pressed (cotton poplin, taffeta) |
| Clingy – hugs the body, follows contours (viscose jersey) | Nubby – small, irregular surface texture (raw silk, bouclé-style weaves) | Firm – noticeable resistance when handled (heavy twill, denim otton) |
| Springy – bounces back after movement (bamboo stretch jersey) | Brushed – raised fibres, soft and cozy (flannel, brushed twill) | Supportive – provides body without stiffness (structured suiting, stretch nylon) |
| Liquid – collapses and pours over itself (cupro) | Cool to the touch – smooth fibres that feel cool on skin (bamboo, rayon) | Holds shape – maintains silhouette over time (denim, canvas) |
| Floaty – light, airy movement (cotton voile, chiffon) | Slubby – visible thick-and-thin yarns (linen, linen blends) | Rustling – audible movement, some stiffness (taffeta, crisp poplin) |
| Heavy drape – weighty but still fluid (heavy tencel velvet) | Rustic – dry, textured, natural feel (linen, hemp blends) | Architectural – supports strong, sculptural forms (structured denim, canvas) |
You’ll notice that many of these words show up again and again in our product descriptions. None of them are perfect on their own, but together they start to narrow the gap between how fabric looks online and how it actually behaves in your hands. Think of this chart as a reference point, not a checklist.
We’ve turned this into a downloadable Fabric Feel reference sheet you can save and actually use. Keep it on hand when shopping online, bring it with you to your local fabric store, or use it while you’re handling fabrics and comparing them side by side. Over time, it helps you build your own internal benchmarks, so fabric descriptions start to connect to real, lived experience instead of just words.
In sewing and fabric terminology, drape refers to how a fabric behaves under its own weight. This is where words like fluid, springy, or floaty from the chart above start to earn their keep. When you hold fabric at one edge and let it fall, does it cascade into fluid folds, or does it hold away from the body? Does it ripple when you move, or does it stay put?
At Core Fabrics, this is often the difference between something like challis and poplin. A viscose, even a heavier one, will fall into narrow, soft folds and move easily with the body. A cotton poplin, especially a crisp one, tends to hold its shape more firmly and create broader folds.
This is where many people get tripped up: weight alone does not determine drape. A heavyweight tencel velvet can drape more fluidly than a lightweight cotton shirting. Fibre content, yarn structure, weave, and finishing all matter as much as (if not more than) the number of grams per square metre. (read more about fabric weight here)
Drape becomes especially important when you’re choosing fabric for garments that rely on movement, skirts, dresses, blouses, wide-leg pants, or when you’re trying to understand why a pattern sample looks flowy while your finished garment feels stiff.
In fabric terms, hand describes how a fabric feels to the touch. what your fingers register when you touch, squeeze, rub, or scrunch it. It covers sensations like softness or firmness, smoothness or texture, dryness or slickness, and whether a fabric feels plush, papery, cool, or cozy.
This is where language breaks down most often. “Soft” can mean brushed and fuzzy, like a cotton flannel. It can also mean smooth and supple, like a modal jersey. Linen shows this tension well. Our midweight European linen feels soft right off the bolt, yet the hand remains slightly rustic.
Hand is deeply personal and highly context-dependent. A fabric that feels wonderful between your fingers may feel irritating against bare skin. Something that feels cozy in winter may feel unbearable in summer. This isn’t a failure of description or experience, it’s simply how bodies work. It’s also why hand is so difficult to learn online, and why swatches and in-person handling are so valuable.
I’m very aware of this personally. I have sensory sensitivities with wool. It can be the softest, coziest wool fabric in the world, lovely to touch with my hands, and I still won’t be able to wear it against my body. That doesn’t make the fabric wrong, and it doesn’t make me picky. It just means that hand is always a relationship between fabric and wearer, not a universal truth.
Structure is about resistance. It describes how much a fabric pushes back when you fold it, crease it, or try to shape it into something else. Structured fabrics support crisp edges and architectural silhouettes. Less structured fabrics collapse, conform, and rely on pattern design, or additional support like interfacing, to hold a shape.
A cotton canvas or denim can have high structure: it resists folding and holds sharp lines beautifully. A cotton jacquard or a sweater knit, on the other hand, can have very little structure, even if it’s thick or heavy. It might collapse, and mold itself to the body.
This is where thinking in only one dimension falls apart. A fabric can have low drape and low structure (like a thick sweater knit), or high drape with some structure (like a heavy silk or ponte knit). Understanding structure helps explain why two fabrics with similar drape can behave very differently once sewn.
Fabric feel is hard to describe because it’s multidimensional, comparative, and embodied. No single word captures movement, touch, and resistance at once. We understand fabric best by comparing it to other fabrics. And most importantly, fabric knowledge lives in the hands and body, not just the intellect.
End use changes everything. A fabric that feels perfect for a gathered dress may feel completely wrong for a tailored jacket. This is also why shopping for fabric online can feel like a gamble if you’re still building your internal reference points.
There’s no shortcut for experience, but there are ways to make that experience compound instead of starting from scratch every time. This is something I’ve found incredibly useful over the years, especially when shopping for fabric online.
When I handle fabric in person, I let it hang over my hand and really look at the folds it forms. I scrunch it into a ball and release it to see whether it relaxes quickly or holds onto wrinkles. I fold sharp creases and smooth them out. Sometimes I drape it over my shoulder or against my body and notice how it responds to gravity and movement.
Then, I look back at the product photos of that exact fabric. I pay attention to how the folds look in the images, how sharp or soft the edges appear, how much the fabric seems to collapse or stand away from itself. I try to consciously link what my hands just learned to what my eyes see on the screen.
That act of translation is powerful. Over time, you start to build a personal visual vocabulary. A certain kind of ripple in a photo begins to signal fluid drape. A flatter, more angular fold starts to read as structure. It doesn’t happen instantly, but it does happen, and once it clicks, online fabric shopping becomes far less of a gamble.
Comparisons speed this up even more. Touching one fabric in isolation teaches you very little. Touching two similar fabrics back to back, two cottons with different weights, linen versus linen‑viscose, a woven and knit made from the same fibre, sharpens your perception quickly. Even if words feel clumsy at first, the sensory difference is doing real work in the background.
I also pay close attention to finished garments, both ones I’ve made and ones I wear regularly. Does a skirt swing or stay close to the body? Do wrinkles fall out with wear or multiply by the hour? Does the garment feel supportive, crisp, or heavy?
If you can, keeping a small swatch library helps anchor all of this. Label fabrics with fibre content, weight, and your own notes about drape, hand, and structure. Over time, those notes become shorthand for future decisions, and make that visual-to-sensory translation even faster.
Words will never be perfect descriptors of fabric. They’re too blunt for something this nuanced. But that doesn’t make them useless. Once you’ve built some lived, sensory experience, words become tools, not definitions.
At that point, terms like soft, crisp, fluid, or structured start to help you predict how a fabric will behave, not just how it might feel in isolation. They give you a way to translate between what you’ve felt before and what you’re seeing on a screen or reading on a product page.
Just as importantly, they help you choose based on your own preferences. You might love a fabric with a dry, slightly crisp hand and enough structure to hold a shape, or you might prefer something that drapes, and moves with you. Once your hands know, the language follows. And when that happens, fabric descriptions stop feeling vague and start feeling useful, because they’re grounded in your own experience.
I still spend way too much time touching and comparing fabrics before doing a description. It’s part of the job, but it’s also just something I genuinely enjoy. A feather‑light rayon challis that barely feels there, or a softly brushed cotton twill shirting with a bit of body, those are real sensory delights for me. What are yours?
