Since this is the harvest season for cotton I thought you might be interested in seeing some of these pics.

How cool!!!

I have always wondered what a cotton gin is? I find how things are made interesting.

I love seeing the cotton fields in Arkansas and southern Missouri. My Mom and her family was cotton pickers when she was a kid. She told many stories around time in the cotton fields. My favorite one is when she was eight, she found some bricks at the end of a row. When you get paid by the pound, she knew if her bag was heavier she would get paid more. Those old men knew how heavy a bag should be and picked up on something amiss. Found the bricks and nicknamed her "the Brick Picker"

Thank you for sharing. I liked the pic.

Thanks for that- I have never seen cotton growing.

Thank you so much for sharing, living up North, we never get to see this. How can we complain about the cost of cotton after seeing this.

Those are great thank you, I have a "cotton wall" in my family room. Has a cotton plant roots and all and pictures of mules as my DH in his youth had them on the Missouri farm his dad worked..........calla Pick some bouls for me for a jar.........

Great photos, cotton is being harvested down here in Texas now too!. My husband pointed out the loose white bolls all along the side of the road from when the trucks with the baled cotton goes by. Theyu bale it in big huge bread loaves down here, don't think I've ever seen it wrapped in yellow!

I am a spinner too, I used to collect all the cotton bolls along the roadways & spin it, too old & lazy to get out there & scavenge now though.

Debs & Hemi

Cotton is raised in CA too. when I was a kid, Dad stopped by the road so I could pick up one of the cotton balls that had fallen by the wayside.

Thank you for sharing your pictures. Very interesting. I've never seen a cotton plant or field before. Interesting to see the bales, too.

As we drove from Ohio to Texas last week, we saw these fields along the highway. At first I thought it was wildflowers,but then realized it was the "factory" where quilting fabric came from!

How interesting. Really shows how full circle everything comes.

The original mechanised cotton gin was a screen that used wire hooks to pull the cotton fibres through the screen, which the cottonseeds were too large to pass through, plus brushes that cleaned the cotton fibres off the wire hooks.

Modern cotton gins operate on the same basic principle, but with lots more brushes, screen, etc. And also dryers to drive the remaining moisture out of the cotton fibre, combs to lay the loose fibres down in continuous organised sheets, folding or rolling mechanisms to create bales, etc.

I still wonder what might have happened historically if coloured cotton had become the crop of choice. Natural coloured cotton has a shorter fibre length but the fibres are very loosely attached to the seed and can be easily wiped off by hand or by rolling the bolls between a flat surface and a roller that squeezes the seeds out. Without the need for cheap labour that made white cotton economically feasible to grow, would the US have had slavery? Or would slavery have lasted so long in the US?

I have seen corn fields, soybean fields, sugar cane, pineapple, tobacco and I dont think one of them looked quite as interesting as the cotton fields do.. Thanks...

Really neat!! I remember seeing fields when I was little, but never see them anymore... I wonder where that was.... Lol

Wow, I've not seen this before. Very interesting. Thank you for showing the cradle to production (smile). It is greatly appreciated.

Just drove past some cotton fields here in North Carolina last weekend. Looks like they are ready for harvest!

Great pics. Thanks for sharing.

I've never seen a cotton plant before. Thanks for showing us the pics.

Don't you wonder who looked at the first cotton plant and figured out it could be made into cloth?
Thanks for showing that.

We drive by cotton fields quite often but my children had never seen a cotton boll up close. Recently we stopped and picked one that was near harvesting. That is also an interesting "close up" experience if you have never seen one. I lived on a cotton farm for a while and there are many hours put into the process of growing, picking and processing raw cotton.

Wow, that is awesome to see!! Thanks

I still love to drive through the cotton fields in N. Fl and lower Alabama.
After the cotton has been harvested, I will see it blowing along the side of the roads where it blew from the trucks. As kids, we used to lie on the cleaned cotton seed. They were so slick and would shift with your weight. The seeds were ground up for for the oil and livestock feed.

Thanks for sharing. I've seen cotton growing in the wild but this got me
curious how it's baled. I worked in textiles for 12 years so I'm familiar
with the spinning and weaving, etc. but not with the ginning process.
Those who are interested can go to Youtube...type "cotton gin".
Very interesting.

Thanks for sharing. The pictures are very cool.

It all looks very tidy.The cotton fields I've seen over here usually have tufts of cotton bolls along the edge of the road and fluffing around the fields.

I've never seen cotton growing either - that's awesome, thanks for sharing :)

I love your story, that's so sweet...I can just picture a little 8 yr old lugging bricks...

My son on a trip down south..was able to pick some cotton..we still have it to this day. He was only 11 when he went with his aunt and uncle on this trip. He still talks about it to this day.

how many plants to make a yard of fabric?

Hi all, I was born and grew up in Fresno, CA. I also was a cotton picker. It is not an easy job. No telling what critters you might find, and the cotton is hard to get off the boll. The bags you put them in are HUGH and cotton by itself doesn't weight much, takes a lot of cotton balls to fill a bag. Glad I don't do that anymore. Just like to play with the finished product. Happy quilting all. BrendaK

great pictures~ thanks for sharing

I just came from a visit to my grandmother's town, where the cotton gin was hoppin' and the roads were lined with white fluff! I eyed the stuff with new interest as a quilter and wondered how many yards of quilting cotton might come from a bale of cotton (these bales were huge rectangles)!

I was wondering these days, too, what happens to the "scrap" cotton left after the pickers have picked? Anyone know? I know it wouldn't have been wasted in my Gran's time.

I use to grade the cotton in Arkansas, would do it from Sept. to Dec. then we move to Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama or Georgia to grade their cotton, then on to Califorinia. The cotton is very different in Calif. we had to go to a different school to learn to grade their cotton.. They cut a piece out of the big bales in the field and we grade the piece and let the farmer know how much it is worth..then a buyer will get in touch with the farmer and they hackle over the price..this is all done thru the federal government, we would work 10 days stright, before a day off and had 3 shifts running during the peak season.
I think this is the longest reply I have every typed. LOL

neat Barb

I've never seen the cotton in the field, I've seen the fields after they have been picked however and I have never seen the bales so thanks for sharing these pictures. Very interesting.

The cotton left in the fields are plowed under, in the days of hand picking, you wouldn,t see that much cotton left in the field..The machines only go so deep to the ground and can't pick the lower branches, does that make sense? This year in Alabama the cotton didn't grow tall, so the farmers lost alot of crop.

Also the worest grade of cotton makes blue jeans LOL

Very interesting...and so are all of your cotton stories.

Been there, done that on the cotton pickin and chopping. Hated it, but thankful for the hard work that made me what I am today.