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:
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https://extension.missouri.edu/publications/g4268
- 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
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what's in your belly button?
So the lint… What is it exactly?
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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 part 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."
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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. ​
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MIND. BLOWING. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
micro to macro
This is all pretty detailed.
Let’s not lose sight of the big picture.
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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…
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And we haven't even touched the harvesting and processing of this incredible plant yet…
Next week in I, Quilt.
Hit reply and let me know:
what’s one small thing that has blown your mind lately?
stay curious, keep creating.
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