Cotton, a traditional cloth.

Cotton as a fabric is very subtly textured. It is soft by the touch, and versatile as a fabric, since it can be molded into various forms. It is plant based and traditionally spun. It is a natural cellulosic fibre, and consequently a cool fabric. It is known as a ‘traditional’ fibre.

When put to a burn test, cotton burns, and emits a smell similar to that of burning paper or wood. It also leaves a fine grey ash residue.

Cotton comes from the puffy, cotton fluff of seedpods. It is ideal for making thread and cloth because the flattened, twisted fibres interlock and bond when spun into threads. There is then the separation of the seeds from the cotton with a cotton gin consisting of hooked-tooth saws that tear the fibres from the seeds. Afterwards, the lint is sucked away into a collection area. The cottons fibers are pressed into bales weighing around 500 pounds. At cotton mills, picking machines clean the cotton and make it into rolls called laps. Carding machines, cylinders with wire points, straighten the fibres and mold them into rope-like strands called slivers. Drawing frames draw out several slivers at a time and combine them into single strands. Riving machines twist and draw out the cotton into a thinner strand. Spinning machines draw and twist the strands into yarns and widen them on bobbins for weaving.

Yarns of cotton are woven together on looms with warps on rollers. Every other warp thread is lifted all at once while a shuttle drives wefts under the even warp threads and over the odd ones. Rollers shift so that the weft carried by the shuttle on the return journey goes over the even warp threads and under the odd ones. The shuttle can make 200 or more trips a minute. Afterwards the unfinished fabric is taken to a converter for final processing. This includes bleaching, dying, preshrinking and printing the fabric. The fabric can be combed into denim or chambray and given a finishing of crepe, glazed chintze or water resistance.

Cotton accounts for 40 percent of the fibre used today. About 25 million tons of cotton is produced in a year. Cotton needs a long hot summer and a decent amount of water to grow. Cotton depletes nutrients in the soil quickly and is often rotated with other crops.

Cotton can also be ground into currency, crushed into vegetable oil, and woven into coffee filters, book-bindings, tents, diapers and fishnet.

Cotton was once called white gold. Developing the machinery to quickly make it into cloth was a driving force behind the Industrial Revolution. Providing labor to produce it for these machines was behind the slave economy in the southern United States and in turn and indirect cause of the American Civil War. Making money from it kept the colonial economies going in places like India and Egypt.