From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield.

Um.

I'm working on the first song of my most ambitious project yet.

Fabric, the musical.

It's a laugh till you cry, soon-to-be Tony Award-winning musical all about.

You guessed it? Fabric.

Picture this.

We open on a lonely clerk in a New York fabric store who finds his passion in sewing

custom suits out of leftover fabric scraps. After a chance encounter, he skyrockets to fame,

but things don't quite go the way he expected, and he learns a lot about himself and about love

along the way. Here, listen to this. It's the song where he's

rummaging through the bin to find his favorite fabric flannel. I could always use some more of a

velvet or velour or a corollite to make a dashing jacket. Some linen or organza for a trouser-leg

bananas. Polyester fabric simply will not hack it.

I could start a TV channel just to share my love of flannel. It's made with, um, it's a soft and fuzzy.

Oh, no, I don't know anything about flannel. And my friend Phoebe was wondering, too,

how is flannel made? I asked cloth expert Susan Brown to help me and Phoebe out.

What makes it distinctively flannel-y is that it has what's called a napped surface.

My name is Susan Brown, and I'm the associate curator and acting head of the Textiles Collection

at Cooper Hewitt's Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.

Flatall originally was a wool material originating somewhere in New York City. Flannel originally was a wool material,

originating somewhere in the United Kingdom

...