Sean Long, age 10, of Phoenix, Ariz., for his question:
HOW IS COTTON MADE INTO CLOTH?
Cotton is the most important fiber that man uses to make clothing and three out of every four persons in the world wear cotton clothing. An item of cotton clothing starts on a cotton plant that grows in fertile ground in temperate areas.
In the United States cotton grows in a belt that includes 14 states, listed here in order of their importance in numbers of bales: Texas, California, Mississippi, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Today, machines harvest almost all of the cotton in the United States. The bolls are taken to a cotton gin. Burr machines and cleaners remove burrs, leaves and other trash. Then the cotton goes to machines called gin stands which pull the lint off the seeds. Lint is further cleaned in lint cleaning machines.
Next the lint goes to the bale press which packs it into 480 pound bales. Six steel ties bind each bale that measures about 55 by 25 by 45 inches, or about the size of a large home refrigerator.
When cotton arrives at a textile mill, workers remove the steel ties and a blending machine mixes and breaks up the compressed layers of cotton. Several blenders feed the cotton into cleaning machines which further mix the cotton, break it into smaller pieces and clean it.
Cotton is then sucked through a pipe to picking machines where beaters strike the cotton repeatedly and form the lint into a lap or long roiled sheet. Then in a carding machine the fibers are separated and the short ones removed. Next the comber takes out still more short fibers.
The spinning processes basically do three jobs: they draft the cotton or reduce it to smaller and smaller structures; they straighten and parallel the fibers; and they twist the yarn.
Yarn is the final product of spinning and the process ends as yarn is woven into cloth.
Many yarns are tied end to end to form one long yarn. Yarns to be woven lengthwise in cloth are warped or wound side by side on a gigantic spool called a bean. Several hundred yarns can be wound on' each beam.
Several beams fit into a slashing machine. This machine unwinds the yarn and feeds them through a vat of sizing, or a mixture of starch, gum and resins. Then it dries and rewinds the yarns. Sizing strengthens the yarns and protects them during weaving.
Looms weave yarn into cloth.
After inspectors check the cloth, the sizing is dissolved in hot water and washed away. Some cloth passes through a gas flame that singes the fuzz off its surface.
Boiling the cloth in an alkaline solution in a tightly closed kier or large vat removes any natural waxes, colored substances or discoloration. The cloth is then bleached in hypochlorite or peroxide.
The cloth may then pass through a machine that prints various designs on it. Cloth intended to be solid colored goes through a dye bath.
Colored yarns are used to weave designs into some fabrics.