Christmas is a great time of the year and I have to say it has motivated me to blog several times. Last year, I wrote (and sang) the  “12 days of Cotton” and I’ve also written a post about the Top 12 Indisputable Facts About Santa Being a Cowboy or Farmer. And if you look on the list of the top posts right now, you’ll see my post where I give my thoughts on Why Shouldn’t I Say Merry Christmas? Happy Holidays Isn’t the Same!

With the holidays, I love things fresh from the farm throughout the year. And at the holidays, several fresh from the farm foods to mind — that Christmas ham or maybe a big turkey. I also have had the chance to enjoy olive oil from friends  farms or cheeses others produce milk for! I think my nieces & nephews would be more likely to point to pancakes or French toast with maple syrup.

But like a lot of folks, this weekend I’m trying to finish up Christmas shopping and that turns me to presents. You know JP LOVES COTTON so some of my favorite Christmas gifts are made of my favorite fiber — love cotton gifts! I don’t want to give away any of the presents I have under the tree for family and friends, but its common for me to buy and to LOVE receiving these cotton gifts:

A perfect hoodie! As I write this I am sitting here wearing a hoodie I bought myself during my summer roadtrip out west. The classic hoodie is a perfect part of winter wardrobes! I mean they are great for layering, can show your personality or loyalties (I have a great new University of Memphis hoodie my sis gave me for my birthday).

Thick, soft flannel sheets! With the long, cold nights of winter, snuggling into a really warm bed. Good cotton flannel sheets are a must for me and have been popular for my family for generations! (Yes, we have been generations of cold weather wimps LOL.)

T-Shirts! Classic or Novelty, you have to love them!  There are cotton t-shirts to fit every style! A simple black or grey v-neck t-shirt can be worn to all sorts of events and places. Really good tees are put on under a great leather blazer or simply make a casual day in the park a bit nicer. On the other hand, you can match novelty shirts to express the personalities, mindset or whatever. I love wearing shirts that start conversations when I’m goofing off…. this is a long-time favorite conversation starter! But I tend to opt for simple solids if I’m visiting friends or taking photos. And both are great at layering in winter! 

Pajamas, especially flannel PJs! Friends and I were talking last week and their family and parts of mine have the same tradition and yes, they are cotton gifts — new PJs for Christmas! Whether they are Christmas themed, plaid, solid colors, or whether they are bought at Old Navy or Victoria’s Secret or something else…. Lots of people love PJs whether they wear them around the house, sleep in them or go out in them!

Money! US Dollars are made of cotton! It’s funny, but as I thought through the various gifts that are made of cotton that have really brought smiles to faces, I remembered how I would open cards as a child and seeing cash fall out or how my nephew has previously put money on his list. And in case you didn’t know, the paper US dollars are printed on is 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen. (For this, I’ll use the legendary $5 entertainment tip.)

What’s your favorite cotton gifts that start on a cotton farm?

The post Five Favorite Christmas Cotton Gifts From the Farm! appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Over the last two weeks, I have seen some really neat 12 days of Christmas posts. And along the way, I got inspired to put together the “12 Days of Cotton.” Seemed like a fun thing to do. I wrote it down last week and am just getting it to the blog. I hope you enjoy it and you could sing along, at least in your head.

Rather than write out every verse that keeps building, I will cut to the chase. I’m even going to be goofy enough to sing 12 Days of Cotton if you want to give it a listen.

On the twelfth day of cotton, some fiber love I see…

12 farmers farming

11 DD60s

10 Pima shirts

9 designer labels

8 ginners ginning

7 pesky insects

6 row picker

5 bales an acre!

4 warm hoodies

3 good rains

2 cotton socks

and a favorite pair of jeans!

In case any of you are interested in a bit more information on each of the things I included in the lyrics…. here’s some background information.

• 12 farmers farming — Well there are more than 12 cotton farmers for sure, but at a moment’s notice, I can always rattle off a dozen or so names of cotton farmers who are great friends. Who’s on the list really varies based on what I’ve been thinking of that day or week though as there are so very many great people who grow my favorite fiber!  Here are some of them who talk cotton online:
  • Texas’ Suzie Brasher Wilde through her Kissed a Farmer blog and Facebook page
  • Alabama’s Brian Byrd is on Twitter as ?@bigbyrd24 and just finished picking this weekend
  • Georgia’s Trevor Smith is on Twitter and blogging as GAFarmer80
  • Australia’s WarraBoy Brendan Taylor tweets cotton from down under
  • Georgia’s Ashlee blogs at Across the Branch about her family & their cotton & watermelon farm
  • Tennessee’s Bob Walker showed my niece Alicia around her first cotton farm visit.
  • Texas couple Jon and Kelly Whatley are both on Twitter and she has a photo &  family blog called FarmFresh.
  • The Texas Cotton Producers put this together to share their story.
  • California’s Travis Fugitt shares info through his Twitter account @tfugitt and I put some of his pics on my blog.
  • North Carolina’s Brad Warren tweets his crop and recently finished harvest.
  • Oklahoma’s Danny Robbins tweets from @rdr5hunter
  • Australia’s Bess Gairns tells Tales of a Cotton Wife on her blog and has a Facebook page for it too
  • and in case those aren’t the twelve cotton farmers you want to find, I have a list of cotton peeps who tweet you can follow.

• 11 DD60s — This one may be something a few of you aren’t familiar with. I know I wasn’t til I started being surrounded by cotton physiologists! Anyway, DD60s (pronounced D D sixties) are heat units based on temperatures above 60 degrees. Farmers compile this information so they know how the crop is developing. You can learn more about DD60s here.
• 10 Pima shirts — A lot of people are surprised by how soft and yet strong Pima shirts, sheets, etc are. It’s because Pima cotton has longer finer, strong fiber. I wrote a post about Pima cotton & what makes it different a few months ago that you may find interesting.
• 9 designer labels — Great folks work with my favorite fiber! You can get good clothes without spending a lot of money or you can go for really high end fashion that’s more expensive. It is really up to you! You can learn about them through the TheFabricofOurLives.com or @CottonFashion on Twitter.
• 8 ginners ginning — Cotton farmers and consumers depend on a variety of jobs to get that natural fiber from the farm to our wardrobes. One of the ones that just seemed to fit the song was cotton ginners who gin the cotton separating the seed and lint. Here’s a look inside a cotton gin.
• 7 pesky insects — The boll weevil maybe the insect that most people know, but cotton is really attractive to some bad bugs — beet armyworms can really instill fear as can bollworms, budworms, plant bugs, aphids, white flies and more! Mississippi State Extension has a lot of information on the bugs that plague cotton farms. And farmers have a variety of ways to control bugs.
• 6-row picker — The first time you see a six-row cotton picker going across a field of cotton, you may flashback to Star Wars or something! They are hulking machines who do the work of bringing a crop in for most US farmers even if they are four- or five-row pickers. Incredible to watch them run! Here’s some video of a cotton picker from this fall.
• 5 bales an acre! — The phrase alone excites me — five bales an acre! That means a farmer would be harvesting approximately 2,500 pounds of lint in the area that football is played on. While five bales to the acre is rare — the average harvest is closer to 1 – 2 bales an acre but there are farmers who can harvest more depending on the weather conditions, etc.
• 4 warm hoodies — It’s winter! Everyone needs a good hoodie or 12!
• 3 good rains — Water is a must and this year with the drought that plagued most of the Cotton Belt, we would have loved just three good rains! We will dream for a bit more in 2013!
• 2 cotton socks — You can make a bunch of socks out of a bale — more than two thousand pairs actually!
• and a favorite pair of jeans! — My favorite pair of jeans is one that is three sizes smaller than the pair I wore at this time last year! Lee Jeans sent them to me after I featured a photo from their Facebook page on my blog.

———

And now that it is 2018… I decided to do a video!

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Janice Person (@jplovescotton) on Dec 16, 2018 at 6:11pm PST

The post The 12 Days of Cotton — My Christmas Homage to My Favorite Natural Fiber appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I love a day that starts with a friend alerting me to some cottony goodness! That’s exactly what happened today as I checked in on Facebook and saw that my good friend Carrie Mess aka DairyCarrie had tagged me in a post! It read simply “Hey Janice look what’s in this month’s American Airlines magazine.” and showed this photo:

I did what any self-respecting cotton lover would do — searched the net til I found the article online so I could read it! The American Airlines magazine American Way is online, so it just took a little searching to find the Kings of Cotton article. The article starts:

“See, Wade? Look at the weeds in there.” Ben Ivey steers his pickup around the edge of a cotton field. “Are we gonna spray some more? You probably need to.” Ben’s son, Wade, sitting in the back of the truck, just nods. He knows the weeds will be a problem at harvest if they mix with the cotton bolls.

Wade is the fourth generation to farm this land at the edge of El Paso, Texas — and possibly the last. In good years, the Iveys grow Pima cotton fine enough for a Brooks Brothers shirt. But this year, two-thirds of their farmland near the Rio Grande is sitting idle because of the drought. The city is encroaching too. The Ivey farm is the last inside the city limits of El Paso. “Last year, all this was in cotton,” Ben says as the truck lurches over a dirt road by empty fields.

Ben heads back to the family’s battered old ranch office two miles north of the border, steering past a Wal-Mart and warehouses built on their land. Trucks from Mexico whiz by on Loop 375, the massive border highway that encircles El Paso. The Iveys — savvy businessmen as well as farmers — gave up land for the highway, keeping a big parcel for future development. But Ben Ivey is in no hurry to turn his cotton fields under for a shopping center. “Everybody in El Paso can’t figure us out,” he says, chuckling. “We farm valuable commercial corners. We’re probably stupid for not selling because of the money.” He turns the truck toward another plot of cotton and grins. “We like to farm.”

This is what makes America great.

This holiday season, when you wrap up that cotton shirt for Dad or that set of luxury cotton towels for Mom, think of growers like Ben and Wade who are working under drought conditions not seen since the 1950s. They grumble a lot — about Washington’s policies, local interference, water shortages … the usual stuff — but the Irish Iveys have been growing cotton in the high desert since the 1920s, and they are determined to keep the fields in their family another generation. “People these days have grown away from the land,” Ben says as he kneels down in a field, picking the yellow flower off a cotton plant. Beneath the flower is a green ball or “boll,” which will mature and split open to reveal the fluffy white stuff we know as raw cotton.

via Columnists 12-01-2012 :: AmericanWay.

The dilemma the Ivey’s face with urbanization is fairly common. And I admire the Ivey’s for choosing to do what they love rather than taking the easy paycheck and selling all of their farmland for commercial uses.

Christmas Gifts with Farm Origins

I agree! We should think about where our cottony good gifts come from! And I’ve got a few blog posts that may help you think through just that ahead of time!

The Ivey’s grow Pima cotton. Do you know what makes Pima cotton different? I mean otherwise it would say they grow cotton since the vast majority of cotton is upland. Pima is a premium fiber that is longer and stronger than upland. With Pima fiber, textiles can be woven differently and that results in a finer, smoother feel. In fact, my favorite hoodie zipup is Pima. If you’d like to know more about Pima, including what those blooms look like,  you can read this post.

And if you are interested in some of the Christmas presents I gave last year that started on a farm somewhere, well, there is a post for that too! I declared “Farmers Helped Me With My Christmas Shopping ” last year as I reflected on Christmas gifts with farm connections.

What’s one of your favorite gifts that has origins on the farm?

The post Your Brooks Brothers Shirt May Have Started in El Paso, Texas appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Bucking the Wordless patterns to put a brief editor’s note:  My family has the tradition of putting handmade Christmas ornaments on our Christmas trees. I’ve got ornaments from my grandmom, mom, sisters, nieces & nephews, etc. The ornaments that make the most sense for this blog post though are ones that connect to agriculture. And my favorite ones all have a cotton theme!

[slideshow]

The post Wordless Wednesday — Homemade Christmas Tree Ornaments appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.