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Textiles are often dyed, with fabrics available in almost every color. Coloured designs in textiles can be created by weaving together fibers of different colours (plaid), adding coloured stitches to finished fabric (embroidery), creating patterns by tying off areas of cloth and dyeing the rest (tie-dye, or drawing wax designs on cloth and dyeing in between them (batik), or using various printing processes on finished fabric. Woodblock printing , still used in India and elsewhere today, is the oldest of these dating back to at least 600AD in Eygpt.
Textiles are also sometimes bleached. In this process, the original colour of the textile is removed by chemicals or exposure to sunlight, turning the textile pale or white.
Textiles are sometimes finished by starching, which makes the fabric stiff and less prone to wrinkles, or by waterproofing, which makes the fabric slick and impervious to water or other liquids. Since the 1990s, finishing agents have been used to strengthen fabrics and make them wrinkle free.
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