How is cotton, which comes as short strands of fibre from the plant, made into a continuous thread?
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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.
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