Why I'm Spinning Cotton: 002 Wooldn't You Like to Know

So I don't know about you, but I'm looking for an activity to keep me out of trouble, and as I discussed previously, I've landed on spinning, for many reasons, but mostly because my mother gave me her wheel. I was happily flapping the treadles up and down, and the flyer was making such a lovely breeze, until someone interrupted me and asked what I was going to spin. I was perfectly happy spinning the air, but as it turns out, there's quite a variety of fibers that you can tangle together into thread and yarn. Upon a little bit of research, it seems that nobody just picks one fiber to spin. There's all kinds of animal fibers, including a wide array of sheep breeds, alpaca, qiviut, memorial cat hairballs, and insect excretions. There are plant fibers as well, such as bamboo, flax, hemp, and my choice, cotton. There's also a bunch of synthetic bullshit too. It seems that people like to blend a lot of this stuff together, possibly because these fibers have a variety of properties that one would like their final fabric to have. Or maybe it's more fun to just mix a bunch of fuzzy stuff together and see what happens. This is way more than I can handle. Have you been to Ravelry? Of course you have, it's an amazing site and community. One of the things that strikes me though is the huge amount of supplies and equipment some of these folks end up stockpiling. Just check out anyone's attempt to destash, which is a polite term for making your clutter someone else's problem. Often a destash is composed of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some dyed silk sampler because, oooh! It's prettyful! and a couple of ounces Corridale leftover from a colorway where all the good hues got used up, and some soy from that vegan phase you were going through. Yeah, I can't deal with this much random stuff, so I'll just make it really simple. I'll just do one fiber, and that will be cotton. Why?

© New Zealand Films

Because screw wool, that's why. Whoa! Now I've gone too far you say. That's a pretty bold statement for one of the greatest fibers in the history of the world. So let me congratulate wool for it's amazing properties before I get back to hatin' on it:

• Wool is flame retardant without any additional treatment. If you take it away from a flame, it's just got no passion for combustion, and will self-extinguish.
• It's incredibly absorptive. It's hygroscopy allows it to absorb your perspiration, which will apparently keep you cool in the heat, a feature I have never in my life experienced.
• Wool felts easily, unlike my hair, try as I might during that whole Boho trend.
• It doesn't wrinkle.
• It's really stretchy.

© New Zealand Films

For only three of the above reasons I own exactly one wool jacket that I use solely for funerals and job interviews, and thankfully it's lined because wool is scratchy as hell. I've heard people come to the defense of wool, saying that it just wasn't prepared or spun properly, or it was the wrong breed, or came from an unhealthy animal. Maybe I'm just oversensitive then, because I have yet to meet a wool fabric that didn't make me want to crawl out of my skin, and every time I rub sheep sebum (lanolin) on my lips, they crack and bleed. Maybe it's allergies, maybe it's psychological scarring. I accidentally took and animal science class in college once. During the first lab, a sheep dragged me through poop and then the rest of the flock nearly trampled me. I can still hear the thundering of their hooves, darting around my huddled form. Although, in the next lab we got to put our hands in a fistulated cow and that was kinda interesting, and then we got to make our own ice cream. No regrets.

Anyway, cotton. 

• It's lightweight and breathable.
• It's soft.
• Common varieties are naturally white, so less need for bleaching.
• It's a plant. So, instead of growing plants to feed animals for their fiber, you can just skip the middle-man. Also consider that animals require husbandry and produce waste. What I'm proposing here is that cotton is more sustainable than harvesting animal fiber.
• Cotton is stronger when wet, not to be confused with Bon Jovi album, Slippery When Wet.

There are also a lot of problems with cotton. It's not as elastic as wool, but whatevs. Make some jersey out of it then. Cotton has a pretty short staple length (meaning the fibers are really short) which presents different challenges for the handspinner. Because of this, there's a lot of negative sentiment out there about the difficulty of spinning cotton, and as such, it makes finding help or a community of cotton spinners not as easy as finding good resources for handling animal fibers. Cotton is also pretty hungry for oils, which makes some folks complain that spinning cotton dries their hands. Despite these nuisances, it's still my fiber of choice. Why?

Cotton fiber, picked from the boll, seeds not yet removed.

My father grew some cotton, and I feel like I have to use it. 

Moving forward, I'm interested in learning more about the fiber itself, such that I can address the challenges of preparing the fiber for spinning and use as a yarn. I'll share with you what I find out.