OK, OK, who remembers their grade school history class and how Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1794, triggering a global boom for American cotton products?
Today a cotton gin is a building-sized machine able to clean and process truckloads of cotton in just minutes. The gins “fluff” and comb raw cotton to remove seeds, leaf parts and other field materials. Processing also carefully monitors and adjusts moisture content so that the cotton fibers can be uniformly graded by their length and weight.
The cotton bales Soaring Heart receives for yarn or cotton batting are individually sorted, packaged and labeled—moving directly from the field through the gin and into the shipping containers in about oh, 20 minutes.
Soaring Heart’s organic cotton is processed through the gin exactly the same as all other cotton—but is run at the end of each season (after a hard frost) and on days immediately after the machines have been cleaned and repaired. As buyers, we are getting not only the best cotton from the fields, but the best times for running our cotton through the processing machinery. Because cotton is processed without washing, it’s important for our raw materials to be as pure as possible and for machinery to comb out extraneous materials efficiently. And at Soaring Heart, that’s how we make sure no one gets a lumpy, leafy bed!
Michael Schaefer
Author