How is cotton, which comes as short strands of fibre from the plant, made into a continuous thread?
In: 6551
You use a device known as a Spinning Wheel, or whatever its equivalent is for the era and place you’re looking at. It’s hard to explain verbally but here’s a video that shows a bit of how it’s done:
In essence they are rolled into bundles of non-continuous threads and a combo of friction and being twisted together (and sometimes adhesive) holds them together.
Another example of this is to take two stacks of post it notes and interleave the pages. Now try to pull it apart. This illustrates how powerful friction is when you have something with a lot of surface area in a small volume, like in the case of a bundle of short fibers twisted together.
You can do the same thing with phone books but they aren’t as common anymore. It makes for a cool party trick.
Link for more info:
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/27
Basically the same way as any other form of cordage. Flax (linen), hemp, yucca, wool, even dog hair.
The fibers are twisted together so that they grip each other and form a continuous strand. Once you have a long enough strand, in a lot of cases, you can continue adding twist until the line twists around itself in the opposite direction (“reverse-twisted” cordage), leading to something very much stronger.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH_b3Heo48I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH_b3Heo48I)
I actually made a basic [drop-spindle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKAJTKvl0nE) and spun some husky fluff into yarn one time. I’m slightly allergic to pet dander (even though I have a bunch of them) and found out the hard way that spinning it puts a lot more of that in the air, enough to set off my allergies. Which is why I only did it once. I ended up with about 3 feet of yarn, that I managed to reverse-twist into about 2 feet of “[chiengora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiengora)” string.
Ahhhhh! This is the secret to all textiles and cordage.
What you do, basically, is to lay out fibers next to each other so that they are over-lapping, in little bundles.
Pretend you have a bunch of individual fibers @ 10″ long. You can lay them out, lying side by side, and you can stagger them so that one fiber overlaps the one next to it by 7″, and that fiber overlaps 7″ with the next one. Do this until you have 12 fibers across. That means a fiber ends every 3 inches, so now, wherever one ends, add a new fiber.
Now, instead of laying them out flat, pretend they are in a bundle, but still staggered. At any give spot on this bundle, you have at least 11 of the 12 fibers intact. If you twist this bundle up, just like a candy cane is twisted, the twist and the friction is stronger than the “gaps” so you have a single “ply” or twisted rope that is basically 11 strands strong.
But, what holds it in place? What keeps that ply twisted? Well, let’s take two of these 12 strand twisted bundles, side by side, and OVER-TWIST them. Twist much more than you need to create the friction to hold the strands together. If we do that, over-twist them, and then lay the two side by side, as they UN-twist the excess twist out, the two will twist around each other the other direction, leaving the two plies still twisted around themselves, AND around each other.
These two twists balance each other out, and Bam, you have string. Several strings can make rope, etc…
The hard part in real life is taking bundles of combed out fibers of any sort (wool, flax, cotton, milkweed, ramie, dogbane, basting bark, yucca, raffia, jute, whatever…..) and adding the right amount of fibers to create overlap without creating thin or thick, lumpy spots as you go.
ELI5: Have you ever put your headphones in your pocket and had a hard time untangling them? What happens if you just grab both ends and pull? That’s basically what happens but with many more strings that are much smaller and tangled a little more intentionally.
ELIPHD: [Tangle mathematics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangle_(mathematics))
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ELI5 –
Do you know how when you’re playing with play doh and you keep rolling clay on a surface and it gets longer, until it’s too thin and you need to add more clay to increase the length?
This is the same method for fibers. They take a bunch of fibers; overlap them and varied lengths, and “roll” them together (more accurate to say twist) to make a longer string, and add more and more to increase length.
I work carding machines so I’m kinda excited to answer even tho I don’t understand the process completely yet.
Basically each individual fibre gets mechanically separated and roughly oriented in the same sense. After that, different machines simply twist together, pull and mix those rough threads.
The fibre goes through between 6-8 machines, depending on what we are doing (whether it’s coton, lycra, poly, kevlar, etc).
My boss told me every machines stretches the fibre about 6x it’s original lenght. Meaning the loose thread coming out of the first machine (which has about an inch diameter and is extremely fragile) gains 6 times it’s lenght at every step. I work the first two processes and the difference in strength and diameter between the first and second machine is already way noticable.
Now you understand spinning and with the spinning wheel is all about., Carding the fibers, aligning them and then spinning them into a thread. Manually it takes just the right dexterity and tension and the big wheel to keep spinning and turning
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