I’ll confess, I love the casual wear that cotton has turned me onto. You may know how Lee Jeans won my heart and hips. But for work and other occasions that tend to need a different look, I frequently turn to cotton dresses. Sadly, as I am shopping far too often the fabric doesn’t live up to my touch test so I have found trusted sources to return to. 

Some links in this post may result in my getting a commission if you make any purchases. 

Why cotton dresses?

There are a range of fibers available these days for sure. Cotton dresses are the way to go for several reasons.

• Wash & wear — Being able to wash and wear these from home or even quickly launder them when I’m on the road.
• Breathability — Whether you are dressing for a hot & humid summer day or headed to a conference where you need to wear a blazer, having the ability to be comfortable and better regulate your temperature is good. Layering always works well when you talk natural fibers.
• Travel friendly — When you travel as much as I do, you think about how well your clothes travel — that means both how they do when you are pulling them out of a suitcase to wear and that you don’t mind darting through an airport in if needed.
• Layers work well — Lots of people put these away as fall and winter arrive. Not me! With a denim jacket or a blazer, it takes the look up a notch and is still comfortable. That works with air conditioning or if someone has way too much heat blowing, that jacket slides off and I still look good.

I have tried a variety of brands and while a few times I’ve bought something. In the last few years though, I have found a brand that offers good styles & colors with a reasonable price tag. And I love that I can simply drop by a local store rather than buying them in a limited time sell online. Though I also love ordering a few online from time to time, love knowing what to expect in sizing, quality, etc. 

The Best Cotton Dresses

I have two favorites. One I order online and one I can stumble into in a store locally. 

There are a few things that stand out for me with both:

• Diversity of cuts — In the past few years I have found sundresses, maxi dresses and several other cuts. I’ve also found denim skirts and dresses all through the product line.
• Quality that lasts — I’ve found the quality of the fabric and dyes stick with me. In fact, people sometimes ask if what I’m wearing is new because the colors are sharp and the fabric shows no wear despite numerous runs through the washer and dryer.

Online, my go to dress site is Svaha. I go back time and time again. They have smart and fun patterns in their line. I have some that people think are cool prints and when they look closer they get cooler cause it shares something related to science, writing, etc. And their dresses all have pockets ya’ll. And I probably bought more than half a dozen dresses and several pairs of leggings before I realized I could make a commission of any kind!

Locally, the brand I’m talking about is Chaps by Ralph Lauren and it is sold at Kohl’s. (This post isn’t sponsored but they are welcome to reach out as I wear so much of it I’m definitely an authentic ambassador. I could use more though!) For me, I like that the dresses both look fresh and classic. The colors are in the parts of the color spectrum that stick with you season after season. Classic blues, reds, greens, etc rather than the hot new fluorescent.

And as anyone who goes to Kohl’s knows, it is possible to find things on sale or where Kohl’s cash is part of the equation.

What’s your favorite cotton brand for business / nice casual dresses?

The post Finding Great Cotton Dresses for Year-Round Wear appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

If you are a fan of Hayden Panettiere, you know the actress has made a name for herself by playing the tomboy daughter of a football coach, a high school cheerleader and hero who can produce fire and a rising star in Nashville who has more than a few personal problems. Well, she is drawing attention to my favorite fiber now as a new spokesperson for Cotton Incorporated.

Have you seen that Hayden Panetierre cotton commercial? The new commercials featuring Panettiere singing her own unique version of the memorable “The Fabric of Our Lives” theme song started airing in April. And if you haven’t seen it, you really should check it out. And to make it really easy for you, I’m embedding the video here!

How is cotton featured in Hayden Paniettiere’s closet?

One of the cool pieces of the advertisements over the past five years has been seeing the different styles the various spokespeople have had. Hayden Paniettiere doesn’t disappoint as you saw in the commercial! She has a wide range of cotton clothing — from clothes that are campfire perfect, to trendy pieces for a night out on the town to something more formal. I mean check out a few of the outfits in these photos.

And a really cool feature on The Fabric of Our Lives site is the ability to check out the pieces in Hayden Panettiere’s closet. You can click on a piece and see where the outfit is from and it even takes you to another video of Paniettiere talking about the piece, how she pairs it with other things in her closet, etc. There’s also a Q&A with her generally talking about clothes, fashion and of course cotton:

How do you feel about cotton as a fabric?

What could be better than cotton? It’s my go-to. I can dress it up and wear it as a form-fitting dress, or dress it down as a soft and comfy tee. I know I’ll be fashionable and comfy either way. When I can look good AND feel good, I’m happy.

via Cotton: The Fabric of Our Lives: Hayden’s Profile.

Why advertise cotton?

I’ve previously written a post on the reasons for the ad campaign on cotton. The ad campaigns for cotton are funded through a commodity program that seeks to increase the marketability of my favorite fiber. And Cotton Inc. comes up with the awesome creative. The ads are funded by cotton farmers and the people who import cotton. The ads are designed to increase awareness in cotton and cotton farmers have an interest in keeping cotton top of mind, especially since the makers of all the synthetic fibers like polyester have big ad budgets, advertising is part of it.

But there are other things to funded through the monies farmers pay into Cotton Inc — research and development of textile processes, cotton production practices, etc which help keep cotton competitive with synthetic fibers in other areas or even help discover new uses.

More Information on Cotton

I love putting information about cotton together for the blog so let me start this section with the various resources here on the blog.

• The cotton category of posts includes pieces of all sorts — news, information, photos, etc. If its about cotton and on this blog, it should have been thrown in this category. Any time you are on the blog and interested in finding this set of posts you can just go all the way to the top of the screen and select cotton and you’ll get that done too. 
• There are also some groupings of posts within that category that help you find something more specifically. 
  • My series of Cotton 101 posts has about 20 posts in it a few of which are highlighted on this Cotton 101 page. Cotton 101 posts are the ones that talk through some of the basics of cotton. I’d love to know what I’m missing! 
  • To better understand about how others think & feel about cotton, I have a series of cotton guest posts. If you’d like to join the series, please read

    What is it that you love about cotton? Please join a series of cottony goodness!

To find our more about Cotton Inc. and the kind of things they put out about cotton clothes and textiles, you can check out:

• Websites for Cotton Inc include the fashion-oriented thefabricofourlives.com,
• There is a Facebook cotton page  (who doesn’t “like” cotton?)
• Fashionable tweets go out from @CottonFashion.
• And great videos are on the CottonFabricofOurLives YouTube Channel.

The post What’s with that Hayden Panettiere cotton commercial? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

This fall, while in Kansas for the State of Now, I took the backroads from Hutchison toward the part of northwestern Oklahoma I called home for four years while I was in college. When I was driving through an “s” curve, I saw this sign and had to stop — yes, the cotton logo had demanded my attention! I thought I’d quickly snap a photo or two and get back on the road, but then a loaded truck came by and I realized the cotton gin was incredibly close. Just felt like I had to stop! Here are the photos I snapped and some of the things I saw that afternoon.

Driving down the road, I saw this sign & had to stop — Southern Kansas Cotton Growers Cooperative

A module truck drove by as I took the photo of the coop’s sign… I knew the gin had to be close by so I followed it! I went into the office while the driver had the module weighed in.

Self-portrait (that’s me Janice Person) at a cotton cooperative, modules in the background. It was a really windy day!

a cotton module (tightly compacted seed cotton straight from the field) enters the gin, and first step is it is pulled apart

These are the gin stands — the equipment that will separate cotton lint from cotton seeds

Closeup of the part of the gin stand that separates lint from seed — those are really small saws that pull the lint through

Cotton gin control panel

This is the bale press — the piece of equipment that compacts cotton lint into a bale for storage & transport for use in textiles

The gin’s mechanic was working on equipment and was nice enough to stop and visit for a few minutes. The coop has two gins that they alternated running this season. He keeps things in good mechanical order. Months later, I mentioned meeting him and found out that he has sent his kids to some of the most elite universities in the US based on his hard work in the cotton industry. Love that!

cotton bales ready for shipping

every bale of cotton in the US gets a permanent bale tag that stays with it from gin to fabric

Cottonseed, gin trash, etc are placed outside the gin until its sold by the truck load.

Related articles

• Eli Whitney would have been proud! – Eloy, AZ
• 2012 cotton crop remembered as record-breaking, heart-breaking
• The 12 Days of Cotton – My Christmas Homage to My Favorite Natural Fiber

The post Cotton Gin in Kansas Made Me Pump My Brakes appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Last year, was a first for me. It was the first time in decades that I hadn’t kicked off the new year of winter meetings with the Beltwide Cotton Conferences (aptly names as folks come from all over the Cotton Belt for this). The Beltwide I wrote a short post about it as it happened. And while I have to admit, I had a great distraction since I was in Hawaii for a short vacation before the Farm Bureau’s annual meeting set my winter into work gear.  I have to tell you, it was strange. Surreal even.

I have never been able to match the sense of community at Beltwide. The meeting draws in people from all seven segments of the cotton business — farmers, ginners, warehousemen, cottonseed handlers, merchants, cooperatives and merchandisers. That means everyone from the farm to the finished product comes! There are meetings for all segments in the same place.

That may sound like a huge number of people, but think about it with the numbers I’ll give you.

• Although there are about 2 million farms in the US, only 18,600 cotton farms.
• There are approximately 1,300 cotton gins.
• The cottonseed segment is people who crush cottonseed into oil or work with hulls, etc and it’s tight.
• and on and on.

In addition to all of those segments, you get all the researchers who are investigating new stuff and folks like me who work for companies involved in the cotton industry. Out of that small group a couple thousand of them will come to San Antonio. We are closer than the alumni of major universities — there are fewer people and we get together in person annually.

We’ll attend meetings that help us understand what we can learn from the problems we had this year and we will find out more about the new thing on the horizon. We will celebrate farmers who have had great accomplishments and some of us will think about friends who won’t be there. And we will eat great TexMex while talking to dear friends who we don’t get to see nearly enough. My friend Elton Robinson explains it all in his post encouraging others to “squeeze it for all its worth.”

And if all of that wasn’t enough to get me to pack my suitcase early, I get to present to a group during a workshop. It will be my first time to present at the Beltwide. Quite frankly, I’m psyched. So psyched in fact I’ve already polled folks about cotton and social media here on the blog! Here’s the way I explained it on the blog at work:

I get to leave my mark on the last of the Beltwide Production Conferences during a Tuesday afternoon workshop. I will be alongside two other social media users for “You Are Now the Media: Social Networking in Agriculture” Tuesday morning from 10:30 to noon. My presentation will focus on the use of smartphones in the quest to provide information in videos and photos.

Speaking at Beltwide makes this a first for me but one in which I expect to see familiar faces giving me that friendly smile like Mr. Ray & Ms Dorothy did decades ago. I have joked that my being allowed to present at a conference of PhDs and researchers indicates the end of the world as we know it. But in reality, this year marks the last Production Conference for the cotton industry. The other technical conferences will continue and I expect more people will be encouraged to use social media to both communicate their experiences and to learn from others. And if that’s the case, maybe my being on the agenda makes perfect sense.
via A Beltwide Cotton Conference First After Decades of Attending | Beyond the Rows

I would love to see some familiar faces there Tuesday! You coming?

Related articles

• Poll on Cotton & Social Media (I need your help please!)
• 2013 Farm Press High Cotton winners announced
• The 12 Days of Cotton – My Christmas Homage to My Favorite Natural Fiber

The post Beltwide Cotton Conferences — If you love cotton, you really need to be there! appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Today a friend of mine has a post on the company blog that, with the exception of growing up in Texas and the whole mom thing, feels like I could have written it. Like Molly, I have friends or people I meet when I’m out and about, show some sense of surprise when the conversation turns to where we all work. When I say I work in agriculture that’s usually surprising but it goes up a notch when I explain I work for Monsanto (reminder as the footer says, this is my personal blog).  Sometimes people want to dismiss it as “everyone needs a paycheck” and I have to explain that’s not it. I have a lot of choices. Other times people want to help me see the error of my ways. I usually explain that I choose to work here because I am a true believer in agriculture. I want to make a difference.

Molly does a great job capturing my thoughts as she speaks for herself. The blog post reads:

This is a question I hear again and again from new friends, surprised to hear that I work for Monsanto.  Their surprise is certainly understandable.  I don’t exactly fit the stereotype.  I’m politically progressive, I shop at my local natural food store and the local farmers’ markets, and I belong to natural parenting and attachment parenting mommy groups.  I’ve got my own little organic garden growing in pots out on my back porch.  I even cloth diaper my baby.

So why on earth would I find myself working at a place like Monsanto?  Everyone who’s ever read anything on the internet knows what they say about Big Bad Monsanto.  So why does someone like me, a liberal, political activist, lactivist, environmentalist, marginal locavore, and attachment parenting advocate work for a company like that?

Here’s what I tell my friends:

I didn’t fall into a job and Monsanto.  It wasn’t something that just happened.  I actively sought a position with the company.  I wanted to work here, because I believe the work we are doing has a positive impact on the environment and the world.

I’ll use cotton as an example.  I grew up in the Brazos River Valley in Texas, and cotton is something I know a little about.  My family used to go every year to a local cotton gin festival. We took tours of the cotton gins. I learned about pickers, strippers, modules, and bales in 4H.  And it was always fun to pick up the leftover fluff at the side of the road to play with, pick the seeds out, and comb it until it was soft enough to go into a doll bed.

(continued at You work where? | Beyond the Rows)

I am passionate about agriculture. I love working with farmers and especially enjoy knowing I’m making a positive difference. And I’ve worked for a few companies and made a conscious choice to join Monsanto. I talk to farmers almost daily — whether they use biotech or choose not to, heck, some of my friends are organic farmers, and I really think that we are all better by sharing information freely. With only two percent of America involved in agriculture, we have to look at how all of us can do better to meet the challenges ahead. And in case anyone is interested, agriculture of all sorts is always taking applications! I’d love to see more folks joining our ranks! At Monsanto, on the farm or wherever!

What are things that people are surprised to hear about you?

Related articles

• Meal Six: At Monsanto, I Learned I Am the Problem
• Why would a farmer plant GMO cotton?
• Cotton Is Life in Texas – Cotton Farmers Tell Their Story
• What our fields actually need is a heavy application of honesty

The post Idealistic about the Future of Farming & Working at Monsanto appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.