How cotton yarn is made

Cotton fibers are only a few centimeters long, and spinning twists them into a strand that can be kilometers long.

stations: 6
things upstream: 1
raw source: 1
step from the ground: 1

The short version

Cotton yarn is made by combing loose, short fibers into parallel order and twisting them. After ginning removes the seeds, the lint is opened, blended, carded into a loose rope, drawn thinner and thinner, and finally twisted on a spinning frame. The finished yarn is wound onto cones for weaving or knitting.

Gin out the seeds

Picked cotton is run through a gin that pulls the fiber, called lint, away from the seeds. Before gins, the fibers had to be pulled from the seeds by hand. The leftover seed is pressed for oil.

Goes in
Raw cotton
Open and blend the bales

Compressed bales are broken open and fibers from several bales are mixed together, so the yarn comes out the same from one bobbin to the next.
Card into a loose rope

Wire-covered rollers comb the tufts of cotton into parallel strands, removing tangles and short bits. The fibers are gathered into a soft rope called a sliver.
Draw it thinner

Pairs of rollers running at different speeds stretch the sliver. Repeated drawing evens out thick and thin spots and turns it into roving, a thin, lightly twisted strand.
Twist on the spinning frame

On a ring spinning frame, the roving is drafted once more and fed through a small traveller that circles a ring. The spindle turns faster than the traveller, which twists the strand while winding it onto a bobbin.
Wind onto cones

The yarn is rewound from small bobbins onto large cones, ready for weaving or knitting.

End of the lineCotton yarn Next it goes into tennis ball, candle, hoodie and 9 more.

Worth repeating

Short-staple yarn is spun from fibers only 1.9 to 5.1 centimeters long.
The spinning mule, descended from a device invented by Samuel Crompton in 1779, makes a finer, softer and less twisted thread than ring spinning.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin of 1793 helped Britain and the United States raise production, because pulling fibers from seeds by hand had been tediously slow.