gin and tonic

I’ve been hedging on writing about the next part of I, Quilt as historically this part still seems very charged (even though you might be as surprised as I was to find out just how much of the world’s cotton is mechanically harvested today).

But something that is tugging at my curiosity in this sea of information is one particular word.

It keeps flashing at me like a lighthouse as I approach some treacherous rocks.

We started this I, Quilt journey looking at etymology, the history of the development of a word: Cotton.

In this installment of I, Quilt, I’m curious about the process of taking a plant to thread.

How do we get from fluffy and short to sleek, smooth and long?

From cotton boll (the ‘fruit’ of the cotton plant) to thread?

But also… where does the word ‘gin’ come from?

As in cotton gin.

But before we get to the cotton ginning process itself, the bolls need to be harvested… in this instalment of I, Quilt.

the time is ripe

After the toil of 6 months, the cotton plants are ready to be harvested.

This is work done by many hands across many lands.

It might surprise you to know that only 30% of global cotton production is mechanically harvested.

30%.

🤯

Which leaves a whopping 70% of global cotton that is still hand picked each year.

I don’t know about you, but I found this statistic to be particularly arresting.

Great swathes of people or machines descend onto the fields at the nominated time, when the cotton is deemed ready – so when is cotton ready and what determines when it is ripe?

ready or not

Climate – if it is dry or has rained, availability of machinery, maturity of the crop which also depends on how the crop has been cultivated through its growth cycle are all factors.

If you’d like more nuance on the factors, difficulties and decisions that (USA) farmers need to make I found this article including perspectives from a range of US cotton farmers fascinating.

Again, it blows my mind to think how many people in the myriad parts of this process all work together spontaneously to grow and harvest this crop.

Zooming in, another major factor which determines when it’s the right time to harvest depends on micro properties, seen literally at the cellular level of the cotton itself.

Being a cellulose fibre, cotton maturity is determined by the wall thickness of the fibres, and a greater quality of cellulose.

But here we’re getting into the VERY nitty gritty.

the scale of it all

Imagine fields of cotton, great vast areas of the earth covered in fluffy blooming bolls of cotton plants, yet what cotton farmers and processors are really interested in is a microscopic property.

We touch again here on the mysterious micronaire – the modern way to test for the quality and maturity of the cotton itself.

This in itself is a whole field of expertise. I even came across a patent for a cotton maturity detector!

We zoom from field level to fibre level.

If you’ve ever seen Charles and Ray Eames’ fascinating 1977 film ‘Powers of 10’ – you’ll know what I’m seeing when I think about this.

This idea of scale is really mesmerising.

the end game

As these fluffy bolls go on to be prodded and poked, and processed into final products, it is the final product characteristics and the ease of processing that determine the desirable qualities of the cotton itself and hence inform the ideal time that cotton should be picked.

For example, over mature cotton will decrease in colour desirability, becoming less white.

Immature cotton will have a whole host of ‘defects’, including:

neps – small entanglements that appear as white puffs on the woven cotton
Dead cotton – also small white blemishes on dyed cottons, resulting from poor dye uptake
barré – an unintentional repetitive horizontal pattern in fabrics that is generally undesirable

(Side bar: all these ‘faults’ have found a way to become ‘features’:

– neps and dead cotton are those flecky parts we see in some fabrics that are pleasant and often mechanically introduced and enhanced.

– Barré can be used to create a particular effect in fabrics. Even the wrong can be right, if you change your perspective, testament to the ingenuity of humans – what is deemed imperfect is transformed into the desirable.)

And then to the physical act of harvesting itself:

picking time

HAND HARVESTING:

Workers move through the crop 3-4 times during the growing season as the bolls mature on the plant from the bottom up at different times.

The mature bolls are pulled off the plants and sent on to the next step, the sharp seed pods notorious for cutting the hands that pick them.

MECHANICAL HARVESTING:

Crops are defoliated using chemicals that strip the plants of leaves, to reduce the amount of extraneous material that is collected by the machines when they pass to harvest the cotton.

If you’re interested this is a brief look at the historical development of cotton harvesting machinery in the USA.

In the USA where 99% of cotton is machine harvested, one of two techniques are used to harvest cotton depending on the cotton variety grown:

machine picking (70%)
machine stripping (29% – predominantly Texas and Oklahoma).

Australia uses both strippers and pickers as well.

Once harvested the cotton bolls – which contain both the desired cotton lint fibres AND the cotton seeds – are compressed into bales that are transported from the fields for further processing.

Enter the cotton gin.

Ginning is a mechanical cleaning process that separates the seeds, leaves, twigs and other ‘trash’ from the raw cotton fibres.

Once performed by hand, the development of the cotton gin had widespread implications across the cotton industry, just as the mechanisation of any labour intensive work has.

But this is just the very first step in the process of preparing the cotton to be transformed into what we use on our cutting tables.

Like with any good quilting project, we want to dive into the good part, skipping those preparatory steps that seem to get in the way…

But first we need to prepare:

iron the fabric,
cut it into pieces,
organise those pieces

… before we can sew it together into the ‘usable’ part or the quilt top.

It’s no different with cotton.

every great journey starts with a single step

After the cotton is harvested, ginning is just the first of a series of preparatory processes that happen before we even get to the creation of the yarn that can then be used to weave the fabric.

Phew!

Here is a breakdown of the series of steps to go from cotton seed to cotton fabric (along with the names of the various intermediary products).

plant cotton seed
tend and grow crop
harvest crop > make bales of uncleaned seed cotton
transport to cotton gin
gin the cotton – remove all, the leaves etc
cotton is graded for quality
bales of lint are made > cotton lint
bales of lint are transported to the cotton mill
more vegetable matter is removed from cotton
cotton is screened and rolled, fluffed up into a continuous blanket of cotton fibres > lap
cotton lap is carded and combed
cotton fibres are spun > yarn
cotton yarn is woven > greige
woven fabric is finished (including singeing, desizing, scouring, bleaching, mercerising (optional), and drying. The fabric can also be dyed, or different fabric finishes can be applied.) > cambric, canvas, corduroy, denim, flannel, gauze, lawn, muslin, oxford cloth, poplin, quilting cotton, sateen, terry cloth, velour…

Then (only then!) are we ready to make something with it.

🍸I don’t know about you, but I need a sit down and a gin and tonic just thinking about all these processes!

I’ll be including the most curious or interesting parts as we progress on this epic I, Quilt tale.

oriGIN

But what about gin? Where does it come in?

Well, nowhere as it happens.

The part that initially made me so curious, turns out to be infinitely insignificant in this sea of hands that labour to make it possible to transform a plant into a quilt.

The cotton gin is a machine that is used to clean the cotton from its vegetable matter.

The word ‘gin’ is simply an abbreviation of the word engine, so has nothing to do with the gin we drink (whose name derived from the latin word for juniper – the berries used to flavour gin), or even some mysterious etymological origin.

Just a plain old abbreviation.

This is such a simple explanation in the face of the complexities of cotton processing that I am almost embarrassed to include it after all!

But singeing, carding, combing and of course weaving await… stick with me and I’ll see you in the next instalment of I, Quilt.