Marking Identification
Border markings printed or stamped onto unbleached textile edges encode production lineage and batch identities directly into unfinished yardage. Applied immediately after the cloth roll leaves the take-up motion of the machine, the greige fabric selvage stamp provides permanent physical tracking for every roll of flax fabric prior to wet finishing. The marking typically contains the mill identification code, loom station number, raw yarn lot number, and production shift.
Boundary limits apply only to the selvage fringe and waste zone outside the usable cuttable fabric width. The physical stamp ceases to carry commercial value once wet processing facilities trim the edges or when chemical bleaching strips the ink before garment cutting.
Production Traceability
Unprocessed linen yardage passes through scouring, bleaching, washing, and mercerizing steps that risk the intermingling of differing spinning lots or fabric constructions. Inspection operators in Chinese export mills inspect the greige fabric selvage stamp at the batching station to ensure rolls sharing identical lea counts and warp tensions enter the boiling kier together. If yarn barré or uneven shrinkage appears during desizing, technical personnel inspect the edge stamp to isolate the problem to a specific loom or warp beam.
Quality managers record the stamp details on grey fabric inspection sheets, noting point penalties for skewing or ink bleed that might transgress buyer acceptance thresholds. Defective greige rolls with missing or illegible selvage stamps are held back from the dyehouse until laboratory technicians confirm yarn lea and bast purity through chemical testing.
Finishing Tolerance
Buyers of unfinished grey linen require indelible ink formulations that withstand mechanical scouring without migrating into the usable body of the cloth. Excessive pigment transfer onto the main ground constitutes an automatic fabric defect during four-point inspection audits. Mill quality criteria permit edge marking within ten millimeters of the outer edge, while high-end garment buyers often mandate that stamps remain strictly within the trimmed waste strip.
