Our Cotton Plant
12.11.2013 § 1 Comment
This year at Brentano, Aaron (Designer) ordered some cotton seeds, and Lan (Studio Assistant) planted them in a pot outside of the training room. The cotton plant grew healthy and bore fruit.
Cotton Flower
I did not know anything about this project until they posted these photos in our lunch room. The location is a little bit out of the way; one would need to go through the training room and then through two more doors to get outside, so I never go that way.
Cotton Boll
But I went outside to feel the cotton. The raw fiber is so much finer and softer than I’d imagined. How should I describe it? It is like a silk wool, really; I was very surprised. When I use those commercial cotton balls, I always think about how, although bleached to a pure white, they are of such a low quality. I wondered if the fibers from the harvested cotton boll* would be so short, but now I know they aren’t. Of course there are different grades of cotton, but I definitely believe that cotton balls are made with all the leftover short fibers that are not good for spinning yarns.
Perhaps we will plant some flax next year.
Cotton
* That’s not a typo. A “boll” is the capsule that holds the cotton fibers.
Woven-Words 
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