blow your mind

How do you make a plant into fabric?

When we visited Otzi, the 5000 year old human found in the pre-alps about 3 hours drive from my house, the thing that fascinated me the most wasn’t just his 61 tattoos.

It was also how people innovated to use plants to make things to wear.

Otzi was found with this incredible cloak.

Can you guess what it was made from?

Nothing obvious, like the reeds growing in front of you as you sit on a river bank, or the grass you touch with your hands as you walk through a field…

Nope.

This magical waterproof cloak preserved in ice for 5000 years was made from the INNER layer of the bark of a tree.

How do humans get so innovative?

How do we look at something like the inner layer of a tree and decide we can make this into a cloak to keep the rain off?

How many iterations of designs, both ones that worked and ones that failed, went into finding the right material, the right technique, the right length, the right…

In our journey with I, Quilt, we have been looking at cotton – the main material we use to make quilts.

Who looked at this fluffy plant growing in the Indus Valley… on an island in the Caribbean… along the banks of the Middle Nile in the Sudan… and went huh , I reckon I could make that into something useful…

Mind blowing. 🤯

Even more mind blowing is thinking about the long long LONG line of people who innovated the techniques, the technology, the machinery, the transportation to bring us the woven cotton fabrics we know and use today.

And most mind blowing of all is that this process was SPONTANEOUS across generations of human civilizations. No top down organisation, no single centralized power saying ‘this is how you should do it’.

Mind. Blow. Ing. 🤯🤯🤯

So how do you take a fluffy seed pod off a plant and make it into fabric?

In this instalment of I, Quilt…

growing up

As we discovered in this installment of ​I, Quilt​ the primary cotton variety raised today is G. hirsutum – chosen for a variety of reasons, notably its adaptability to a range of climatic conditions and its productivity.

Crops are sewn early spring, then it takes up to 180 days (that’s half a whole year!!) for the plants to mature until they are ready to harvest in late autumn.

All while battling pests – over 30 species of insects that love to eat the plants, and a dozen or so diseases that cause damage to the plants and reduce productivity – and battling the weather.

Too hot, or too cold and the plant’s growth is affected. Too dry and the plant suffers. Too wet and the bolls are destroyed just before harvest.

Heat shock, cold shock, sand blasting, hail damage, lightning, drought, and water logging.

Who’d want to be a cotton plant????

Raising these crops is a fine balance navigated every year by thousands of cotton farmers around the world.

from little things micro things grow…

The plants are leafy, and grow to about 1.2m in height, with roots that reach down 1.5m.

Plants have about 12-16 fruiting branches, ie branches of the plant that yield the flowers that will become the cotton bolls.

And it’s these bolls or seed pods that yield the cellulose fibres that are prized.

I love this image of the timing that a plant produces the various fruiting branches – what design ideas could you get from this series of numbers?

​https://www.cotton.org/tech/ace/growth-and-development.cfm/​

Reproductive growth phases include some very poetic names as the cotton plant blooms including: pinhead square, match head square, candle and white flower.

These all sound like perfect names for quilt blocks or quilt patterns to me!

When a cotton plant can no longer supply the needs of both vegetative and reproductive growth, the plant is biologically programmed to put all its energy into developing the bolls that protect its precious cargo – the seeds.

what does a cotton plant produce?

Here’s a look at what the cotton plant produces in its growth cycle:

• Lint – processed into yarn and fabric
• Seeds – crushed for oil or used as animal feed
• Linters – short fibers left behind on the seed pod after the ginning process, used to make cotton balls for example
• Stalks, Seed Hulls, Leaves – mulched and reapplied to the soil

what’s in your belly button?

So the lint… What is it exactly?

Normally lint is what we roll off our clothes, scrape off dryer screens, or generally discard, but in the case of cotton, it’s the lint that is the gold.

85% of the income from cotton growing comes from the sale of the lint that comes from these bolls. The remaining 15% come from the seeds which are stripped from the lint fibres using a process called ginning.

So, someone somewhere in the history of the evolution of cotton as a fibre, looked at these fluffy seed heads and decided there was something that could be done with the fluff.

Eventually these small fibres will be spun into threads, and woven. So the subsequent mechanical processes they undergo are what determine which desirable characteristics are prized in cotton.

the smallest cog in an empire

So what determines the quality of the cotton produced?

What it all comes down to is the micronaire…

The micro-what???

From ​Cotton.org​:

“Cotton quality is defined by the length, maturity, strength and micronaire of the fiber.”

From ​Barnhardt Cotton​:

“The cotton industry trade association, ​Cotton Inc.​, defines the micronaire as follows:

Micronaire (MIC) is a measure of the air permeability of compressed cotton fibers. It’s often used as an indication of fiber fineness and maturity.

Fiber fineness and maturity are critical for fiber processing, as well as fiber quality. According to the International Trade Centre’s ​Cotton Exporter’s Guide​, cotton’s micronaire measurement impacts multiple aspects of manufacturing cotton goods, from efficiency and performance to quality and appearance of finished products:

• Processing waste
• Neps (knots of tangled fiber)
• Spinning performance
• Yarn and fabric quality
• Dyed fabric appearance”

So this specific, TINY element of the cotton plant is key in the whole cotton manufacturing process.

MIND. BLOWING. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

micro to macro

This is all pretty detailed.

Let’s not lose sight of the big picture.

Zooming out, think of the countless farmers, assistants, agricultural scientists, lab techs, researchers, university professors, and thesis students, technicians, farm store operators, machinery manufacturers, clerks… that are involved in the growing process alone.

Let alone the families, and supporters of these workers.

(who made the quilts they sleep under??)

An incredible synchronous dance of thousands of people across the world who are joined without necessarily even knowing it to bring us the scraps of fabric we use to make our quilts…

And we haven’t even touched the harvesting and processing of this incredible plant yet…

In the next installment of I, Quilt.

LEAVE A COMMENT and let me know:

what’s one small thing that has blown your mind lately?

stay curious, keep creating.

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