How does a field of cotton become fashionable blue jeans?

Cotton is the most common material used for textiles.
Cotton is picked, and then ginned which removes the seeds, before it is transferred to a mill.
Some materials used in textile mills today are almost entirely sythetic, and thus do not begin in the field.

When cotton first arrives at mill it can be very dirty and filled with trash.
The cotton first has to be opened out of the ginned bales, which may sound simple, but this can be e complex process.
- The opening process in many mills requires almost no manpower, because the opening process is very dirty.
- Many mills between the 1950s and the 1970s invested in adding self contained opening units, which help keep workers safe and remove dirt and dust in a self contained environment.
The cotton after most of the trash is removed is rolled into thick lap, which is then carded.
- The carding process involves two stiff bristled combs moving back and forth across each other, which helps straighten the fibers.
- The carding process is the first process in getting the fibers as straight and fine as possible.
- Once fiber is carded the fibers should be parallel with small fibers discarded.
Most textile products that do not have cotton do not use these steps.

The folling steps are quite complex, but they can be thought as simply breaking a fiber as far down as possible, and then combing them for strength. This process is also highly variable as techonology has negated or simplified many steps.
The carded lap is then broken down into many slivers, which are the combed into rolled lap .
The slivers are then drawn out, which pulls and streches the slivers and combines multiple slivers together.
These combined slivers are then placed on a roving frame which streches and thins out the fibers even more.
Folloing the foving frames, the fiber is spun on on a cone, which moves the fibers on mutiple cones to one single cone.
The yarn or thread, which depending on its purpose, can vary vastly in size and coarseness, is no ready to be prepared into a woven sheet or product.

Once enough pices are warpped, then the material is ready to pass through a loom.
- A number of differnt methods are used to finally prepare the thread for weaving. For instnace sometimes thread is glued loosely together before woven.
- The idea is that many pices of thread will be draw out in parallel lines together, wand the weaving should pass through these parallel thread peredicularlly.
The product is then woven into a sheet, into a large roll.
This roll is ready to be finished and the sold to consumers.

Once textiles have been woven into a solid product, it is still not ready to be sold.
The finishing process can be thought of of taking a sholid sheet, like a bed sheet, and cutting and showing it down to a final product, like a T-shirt.
- The finishing process is were products really take shape, as a sheet of textiles has very little value to the average person.
- This does nor dimish the compelexities of taking cotton, or other fiber based products, and turning then first into a straight fiber and then manipulating them into a woven product.