Cotton wool

“ Cotton, therefore, never can become a suitable material for felting purposes, every fibre being smooth from end to end in either direction, and in contradistinction to fur, which, though equally smooth as the cotton in one way, rebels triumphantly when irritated in the contrary direction, as already described. Mechanically speaking, cotton is smooth, solid, and triangular, whilst wool is rough, tubular, and cylindrical. ”

“ As the tree only attains to a height of from twelve to twenty feet, it is difficult to distinguish the tree cotton and the shrub cotton when referred to by travellers.
The cotton plant, in all its varieties, requires a sandy soil. It flourishes on the rocky hills of Hindostan, Africa, and the West Indies, and will grow where the soil is too poor to produce any other valuable crop.
Cotton has always been regarded as indigenous to India, and as the characteristic clothing material of that country, as flax is of Egypt, silk of China, and the wool of sheep and goats of Northern Asia. ”

“ If, therefore, cotton be prepared from the best possible material, and manufactured in such a manner as to obtain the greatest amount of porosity, i.e., when it is loosely woven, it can compete successfully with wool as material for warm underwear; it is, therefore, quite an erroneous view to hold, as so many do, that cotton is very different in this respect from wool; everything depends upon the quality and the manner in which it is manufactured. ”

“ Whenever cotton yarn is used to adulterate other fabrics, it wears shabby and loses its brightness. When it is used to adulterate linen, it becomes fuzzy through wear. One may detect it in linen by rolling the goods between thumb and finger. Linen is a heavier fabric, and wrinkles much more readily than cotton. It wears better, and has an exquisite freshness that is not noticed in cotton fabrics.
Silk Distinguished from Wool. Place the fabric or threads containing animal fibers in cold, concentrated hydrochloric acid. If silk is present it will dissolve, while wool merely swells. ”

“ On the other hand, garments worked entirely from cotton do not possess anything like the power of heat retention as is the case with the pure wool article, and in the important matter of elasticity and absorbency cotton as much inferior to the wool. When the two materials are blended, the resultant is warmer than pure cotton and not so warm as wool, whilst the blended article stands mid-way in absorbency and does not produce the same irritation to the skin as some varieties of pure wool. ”

“ Woollen and Cotton Mixtures.—This term is used to designate fabrics which are composed of the fibres of wool and cotton which have been blended or scribbled together rather than to fabrics composed of distinct threads which are all-cotton and all-wool yarns woven together. A cotton warp and wool weft fabric is a union, not a mixture. Mixtures may be recognised, when dyed, by a careful examination of the fibres constituting the yarn. When such fibres are not of the same colour, it will be found to have been due to the difference of affinity for the dye between cotton and wool. ”

“ Fabrics are printed by coming into contact with rotating rollers on which the pattern is engraved.
The attraction of cotton for coloring is generally feebler than that of wool or silk. Few of the natural dyestuffs attach themselves permanently without use of a mordant. A mordant is a substance which has an affinity for, or which can penetrate, the fiber to be colored, and which possesses the power of combining [Pg 70] with the dyestuff and thus forming an insoluble compound upon the fiber. Cotton is dyed in an unspun state, and also as yarn or spun thread, either in the hank or skein. ”

“ The hatters of Great Britain still raise their wool by the bow. The cotton being thus prepared, without any carding, it is spun by the women; the coarse yarn is spun on a one-thread wheel, and very much resembling those used at the present day by the peasantry in the west of Ireland.
The finer yarn is spun with a metallic spindle, and sometimes without a distaff; a bit of clay is attached as a weight to one end of the spindle, which is turned round with the left hand, whilst the cotton is supplied with the right ”

“ Cotton is more difficult to dye than wool or silk. Although there are now what are called "direct" cotton colors, the usual process is to first treat the cotton goods with a "mordant"—various salts of aluminum, chromium, iron, tin and copper, fixing these on the fiber by means of tannin or alkali. The mordanted cloth is then entered into the dye bath and boiled for an hour or longer, until the desired shade is obtained or the dye bath exhausted. The salts of aluminum are used as mordants for the lighter shades, the salts of chromium for the medium shades, and iron for the dark shades. ”

“ From the year 1770 to 1788 a complete change had gradually been effected in the spinning of yarns. That of wool had disappeared altogether, and that of linen was also nearly gone; cotton, cotton, cotton was become the almost universal material for employment. The hand wheels, with the exception of one establishment, were all thrown into lumber-rooms, the yarn was all spun on common jennies, the carding for all numbers up to 40 hanks in the pound was done on carding-engines ”

“ Silk, wool and linen were in use three or four thousand years ago, but cotton was introduced at a later date, and up to the time of our Saviour, was almost unknown as a material for clothing, except in India. Even in the middle ages, we hear no mention of cotton garments in Europe. The Chinese, who have taken the lead in so many arts, did not adopt cotton for use till the eleventh century, though, for four hundred years previous, they had cultivated it as an ornamental shrub in their gardens. Even at the present day, China imports the wool of this plant for manufacture. ”

“ In confirmation of these remarks it may be observed, that the passages collected in this chapter represent cotton cloth as an expensive and curious production rather than as an article of common use among the Greeks and Romans. Among the ancients linen must have been far cheaper than cotton, whereas the improvements in navigation, the discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and still more the discovery of America, have now made cotton the cheaper article among us, and have thus brought it into general use. ”

“ Mercerized yarn is employed in almost every conceivable manner, not only in the manufacture of half-silk and half-wool fabrics, and in lustrous all-cotton tissues, but also in the production of figures and stripes of cotton goods having non-lustrous grounds. Mercerized yarn used in connection with silk is difficult to detect except by an expert eye.
Characteristics of a good piece of Cotton Cloth. A perfect cotton fiber has little convolutions in it which give the strong twist and spring to a good thread. In this respect the Sea Island cotton is the best. ”

“ As absorbers of moisture, rank, respectively: wool, silk, linen and cotton.
The advantages of cotton over wool lie in its cheapness and non-shrinking qualities. If properly constructed, however, the advantageous properties of wool can be utilized without the shrinking by using a cotton framework, into the meshes of which the loose, raw fleece is worked.
That fabric will be best adapted for health, which combined with greatest porosity, possesses the least (a) conductivity, (b) greatest hydroscopic power, and (c) best shape. ”

“ The soft cotton is the warm coat for the cotton plant seed-baby. The fleecy wool is the warm coat of the sheep, or the little lambs. The web from the silk worm’s cocoon is the cradle in which it sleeps. Linen is made from the stalks of the flax plant.
When these materials are spun, or twisted, into long threads, we have spool cotton and silk, wool yarns, and linen thread, for sewing. ”

“ The cotton framework without, makes the material two-fold in its action; for while the wool has a power of absorption of moisture, the cotton has that of attraction and retention, so that any perspiration exuded from the body is taken up by the cotton from the wool and retained, while any water from without striking the cotton surface is attracted and retained, and prevented from penetrating through to the body. ”

“ An opinion or prejudice prevails widely that cotton is less healthful than linen, based on the fact that, being a less perfect conductor and rougher, cotton irritates the skin more than linen does. Examined with the microscope, the fibers of cotton appear angular and stiff, while those of linen are round and supple. Cotton is not agreeable in cutaneous affections, but wool, in such cases being more hairy and warmer, would be still more disagreeable. ”

“ Our greatest, cheapest, most indispensable fibre is also our latest one. It never formed one of the homespun industries of the colonies; in fact, it was never an article of extended domestic manufacture.
A little cotton was always used in early days for stuffing bedquilts, petticoats, warriors' armor, and similar purposes. It was bought by the pound, [207] East India cotton, in small quantities; the seeds were picked out one by one, by hand; it was carded on wool-cards, and spun into a rather intractable yarn which was used as warp for linsey-woolsey and rag carpets. ”

“ Bains’s “History of the Cotton Manufacture,” p. 12.
Wool, as we have seen, was principally used for weaving in Palestine and Syria, in Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Spain; hemp in the Northern countries of Europe; flax in Egypt (The history of the two last, hemp and flax, is given in Part IV. to which the reader is referred.) ; silk in the central regions of Asia [411] . In like manner cotton has always been characteristic of India. We find this circumstance distinctly noticed by Herodotus [412] . ”

“ India produces several varieties of cotton, both of the herbaceous and the tree kinds. Marco Polo mentions that “cotton is produced in Guzerat in large quantities from a tree that is about six yards in height, and bears during twenty years; but the cotton taken from trees of this age is not adapted for spinning, but only quilting. Such, on the contrary, as is taken from trees of twelve years old, is suitable for muslins and other manufactures of extraordinary fineness [431] .” ”

“ On examining the cotton patterns, we are at once struck with the marked fugitive character of nearly all the natural dyes. The exceptions are: the madder colors, especially when fixed on oil-prepared cotton, as in Turkey red; the black produced by logwood, tannin, and iron; and a few mineral colors, e.g., iron buff, manganese brown, chromate of lead orange, etc., and Prussian blue. Cochineal and its allies, which are such excellent dyes for wool and silk, give only fugitive colors on cotton. ”

“ By having one yarn carrier threaded with cotton and one threaded with wool or worsted, as the case may be, and changing these carriers at the end of every course so as to keep the cotton always knitting at the cams that are leading or making the plain stitch, the cotton alone will draw through on the back of the fabric while the worsted or wool will practically cover the face stitch of the cotton. ”

“ Aside from this, cotton cloth has the advantage over linen of being warmer in winter, and, in summer, of not exposing the body to the dangers of too rapid cooling. It should be used in preference to linen by inhabitants of cold and moist countries. Wool is still more irritating than cotton, on account of the stiffness of the hairs with which it bristles; but the excitation it produces becomes a therapeutic means whenever the skin needs a stimulant. ”

“ The imported Egyptian and Peruvian cotton is landed mainly at New York. Most of the cotton manufacture is carried on in the New England States, but there is a very rapid extension of cotton manufacture in the South.
Wool.—The wool of commerce is a term applied to the fleece of the common sheep, to that of certain species of goat, and to that of the camel and its kind. There is no hard-and-fast distinction between hair and wool, [32] but, in general, wool fibres have rough edges, much resembling overlapping scales which interlock with one another; hair, as a rule, has a hard, smooth surface. ”

“ The raw cotton, which is as cheap as it is excellent and abundant, is, by him who would be clad, handed over with a number of ámoles proportioned to the size of the cloth required. A common bow is used to spread the wool ”

“ The same type of hand cards were also used for cotton in Colonial America, but because the cotton fibers were not laid parallel in the sliver only coarse yarns could be spun. In ancient Peru the fibers for spinning fine cotton yarns were prepared with the fingers alone. In India the cotton fibers were combed with the fine-toothed jawbone of the boalee fish before the fibers were removed from the seed. (J.F. Watson, The textile manufactures and the costumes of the people of India, London, 1866, p. 64.) ”

“ Here are a few things to think about which Miss Travers from the State College told the Mothers' Club of Pleasant Valley to remember in buying wool garments or materials.
1. Wool mixed with cotton should not be sold for all wool. It is a cheaper fabric. It wears fairly well, but is not so warm. Pull the fabric apart, untwist the fibers to see if cotton is present.
2. Garments bought ready-made of cotton and wool do not keep their shape as well as all wool garments. ”