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.

I have to do it. Sure, there were lots of suggestions for C words that are important parts of agriculture and in fact, Kim Parsell gave me a whole list!

KentFarms _LA lobbied for cattle (Angus cattle to be clear) and several people echoed that cows would be a perfect choice and others suggested corn. To do an agricultural A to Z without highlighting my favorite fiber — cotton — as the letter of the day, well, it is unthinkable. And I tried. Seriously. There was a great suggestion from Angel Steffan who left a comment pointing to “C is for Cultivation. Not only the land before be plant, but we need to cultivate young minds interest in Agriculture.” That’s a compelling plea.

But I have to say, I started blogging in large part because when I got on Twitter, I settled on the name @JPlovesCOTTON because it was personal (some dear high school friends called me JP) and it connected me to agriculture through the crop I know best (cotton). Cotton is a passion for me as well as a crop — it comes with a great community of cotton farmers, ginners, merchants, warehousemen, textile manufacturers and more.

But remember, less than 2% of Americans farm and when you look at cotton, it comes down to .006% of us are engaged in cotton farming (thanks to Shawn the magnificent at the National Cotton Council for doing that math!) If someone who has a daily awareness of cotton doesn’t make a point of saying COTTON ROCKS, who should I expect to do that? And you can’t forget all the people who buy cotton products whether or not they produce the crop! I’m wearing jeans and a cotton/silk blend sweater today so I am squarely in the happy consumer camp!

Right now, cotton farmers are looking at the weather forecasts and trying to decide when soils will be warm enough for planting. Cotton seeds do better in warm weather — if it is too cool or too wet, disease can be a problem and that leaves the plant susceptible to a variety of problems throughout the season, but farmers want to plant as early as possible as they look to harvest before winter weather or hurricane seasons hit.

Cotton is a big part of this blog — in fact I have a Cotton 101 page devoted to some of the basics of my favorite crop that highlights posts including:

Cotton is not only a great crop, but it makes incredible fabrics! Textile mills have figured out how to make so many different types of fabric out of the fiber. I really love sweatshirts and jeans! Cotton flannel makes the best PJs and sheets for sleeping in winter!

D is for….

Tomorrow (Thurssday) is the day for the letter “D” so what do you think the word of the day should be?

See the other posts in this series by clicking on the logo at right and reviewing the letters, or by browsing the A to Z ag tag archives. You should also feel free to add ideas for upcoming letters!

The post C is for Cotton — an A to Z Series about Agriculture 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.

The post Cotton Plant 101: What do a cotton plant, blooms & bolls look like? VIDEO appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I have “liked” lot of brand pages on Facebook and have to admit, some of them eventually get unliked or hidden cause they just don’t seem to get the kinds of things I’d be interested to see from a brand. But some friends saw the Lee Jeans page this week and knew they had to call it to my attention. Jodi Oleen was the first to shout at me! And they were right! I was pumped! Look at the photo Lee Jeans shared!

So…. how many pairs of Lee Jeans can you make from one bale of cotton? Well, I’ll give you a hint that Lee didn’t give fans of its page. A bale of cotton weighs just under 500 pounds. With that hint I hope you don’t low ball it too badly. Some of the guesses on the Lee page were obviously not made with that factoid in mind cause I saw one or two guesses that assumed bales were the size of one on my bookshelf!

More than 1,200 people guessed – some of whom definitely did a little internet research. I have to wonder if some of them found an old post of mine where I gave a chart of how many of this or that you could make from a bale. For jeans, you can make 215 pairs! Here are some of the other quantities of various cotton items you can get from a bale of cotton, according to the National Cotton Council, one bale of cotton can make:

• 215 Pairs of Jeans
• 249 Bed Sheets
• 409 Men’s Sport Shirts
• 690 Terry Bath Towels
• 765 Men’s Dress Shirts
• 1,217 Men’s T-Shirts
• 1,256 Pillowcases
• 2,104 Boxer Shorts
• 2,419 Men’s Briefs
• 3,085 Diapers
• 4,321 Mid-Calf Socks
• 6,436 Women’s Knit Briefs
• 21,960 Women’s Handkerchiefs
• 313,600 $100 Bills

If I get to pick, I think I’ll take that last one! Yes, I will take the more than 300k $100 bills!

Another thing to note, bales used to be wrapped in that nice burlap. it helped keep cotton clean and was pretty cheap, well now, bales are wrapped in plastic bags. It keeps them clean, doesn’t run the risk of sticking to the lint (you wouldn’t want burlap fiber making it into your 500 count sheets!)

The post How many pairs of jeans in a bale of cotton?, Lee Jeans Asks appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

It been a couple of years since a college kid seemed to stumble into my social media world. Okay, other college kids stumble in, but this one — Kelly Rivard took up residency! I got to know Kelly through Twitter (@kmrivard) and before long she was appearing all around me! Facebook, Skype, the now nearly forgotten Google Buzz and blogging (you really should check out https://kellymrivard.com). Its been great watching her grow as a person, as a communicator and as a member of a dynamic social media community I love being part of.

When I put out the request for guest posts about cotton, Kelly let me know early she was trying to decide which direction she wanted to go with it. She had a few ideas she was mulling around and she wanted to settle in on just the right one. Well, she hit this one out of the park if you ask me! She’s found a way of showing who she is and how cotton is the fabric of her life in a way that nobody else could do. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

I’m at a stage in my life where I am almost constantly on the go. I juggle different jobs and career-building gigs, a heavy class load, homework, and all the mental strain of wondering where life will take me. There’s of course the demands and desire for a fairly functional social life, too, and volunteer projects, and family obligations. College is exhausting. I think I figured out that at one point in time in my senior year, I was regularly putting in a 70-hour “work week” with jobs, homework, and class. Needless to say, sleep is rare.

I have these “happy places” that allow me to escape from the stresses of college life. They allow me to shut off the world and just “be.” One such place is the creek on my parents’ property. Another is the westward facing deck on my childhood home, where I can watch storms roll in and the sun sink down. My most consistent de-stressing location?

My bed.

I’m a college kid. Let’s be serious here: if I could get paid to nap, it would be my full-time job. If I could take all my classes from here, you betcha I would. As much as I love to get gussied up and impress the world, sometimes sweatpants and a flannel hand-sewn quilt from my grandma just sounds “right.”

I’m picky about my sheets. I like the “t-shirt sheets.” You know, the ones that are pre-softened and a little thicker than normal cotton sheets? It’s like wearing your favorite worn-in t-shirt from that concert you went to years ago, every time you crawl into bed. And my quilt here at school? It’s one of those hand-sawn grandma quilts. You know the type…you can use them forever and ever, even when there’s a split seam or two. They just seem to get warmer and more fluffy with age. I’ve got two of them here at school with me, one made of a lighter cotton and one made of the softest most cuddliest flannel on the face of the earth.

Yeah, you’re jealous.

(Sidenote: my sister is notorious for stealing other people’s grandma quilts. My grandma made about 20 of them in one year and give a quilt to everyone in our family for Christmas. Grandma quilts abound, and if you can’t find one it’s normally because my sister has stolen it.)

Cotton really is the fabric of my life. It’s my safe little warm cocoon of happiness here at school. My cotton grandma quilts are always here to offer a warm hug of comfort and support, even when my family is a hundred (or more) miles away. And, my relationship with cotton goes much further than this. I’m a jeans-and-t-shirt kinda gal, so in a way these cotton articles are a part of my identity. Some of my favorite keepsakes from my late father are the paisley cotton hankies that he always had poking out of one (or more) pockets. (He didn’t always remember if he had one or not, so he’d accrue them in different pockets over a working day as he happened across them.)

On that note, I should probably shake myself out of my “cocoon” and face the day. Sorry, cotton comfiness, until laying in bed is a high-paying professional sport, I need to find other ways to pay the bills!

You can read more stories of people sharing how cotton is the fabric of their life or read about how cotton is produced by checking out some of the other things on the blog.

The post Wanted: Job that Pays Well for Napping / Cocooning in Comfort appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

As you may have seen, I am asking various people who love cotton to guest post for the blog. Today’s photos were meant to be a wordless Wednesday post  but I turned a bit more wordy. Ooops! The photos were sent by farmer Travis Fugitt (@TFugitt on Twitter) who knows this is my first planting season in a very long time where I don’t have cotton going in the ground within a few miles of my home. He has been nice enough to share the excitement of planting season through sending me photos via both Twitter and Facebook. There is always something happening on Travis’ Bakersfield, CA area farm as they grow quite a few crops. This year he’s growing corn, safflower, cotton, alfalfa, carrots, cabbage, onions, sweet corn, blackeyed peas, garbanzo beans, garlic, wheat, oats and milo. I hope you enjoy Travis’ photos and that my captions and text help explain what he’s sharing!

The 2012 cotton crop of Deltapine cotton is being planted today (April 6) in sunny CA!! This is the view Travis sees when he looks out the rear window of the tractor’s cab at the planter. 

Looking out the windshield, Travis is showing us he’s using a 6 row planter — you can see he’s already planted rows on either side of him. The planter makes a small cut into the soil places the seed & presses the soil together. 

Seeing the field from the driver’s seat was awesome…. also appreciate that Travis took time to share the fact he was planting the brand of seed I’ve worked with since 1996 — Deltapine! Here are photos of the bags he was planting.

Deltapine Cotton Seed – “Dedicated to cotton, committed to you. We bring innovation and proven high performance to every cotton seed you plant. Cotton is our heritage. Peace of mind is the result. No other brand is so deeply committed to farmers and the future of cotton.”

The end of the seed bag contains a lot of information for farmers to refer to. Among the information you can see is the variety he’s planting (this is an experimental variety that contains the proven traits of Bollgard 2 and Roundup Ready Flex traits to help manage insect & weed pests), the lot number, when & where it was produced & quality tested as well as the number of seed per pound & bag. 

He even took time to share what a pretty cotton harvest they had last season with this photo from December 2011.

December 2011 cotton harvest

Learn more about planting cotton from these Cotton 101 posts:

• Cotton 101: Planting Considerations
• Cotton 101: Things Farmers Think Through in Selecting Cotton Varieties
• Cotton 101: What does a cotton plant or field look like?

The post Planting Cotton in California appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Recently, when I wrote a blog post about the fact farmers are the ones paying for the ads that support the fabric of our lives campaign, a cotton farmer from the Texas High Plains left a comment on my Facebook page. I’ve been thinking about it since. He said:

“Few people have any idea how much cotton means to our lives. Last week I helped with the funeral of a man whose ground we have farmed for the past 23 years. I had a boll of cotton in my pocket through the service. In our home we have cotton in a vase like most folks would have flowers… Thank you for all you do to spread the word of the fabric of our lives!!!”

Since I started my blog in 2009 I have written a bunch of blog posts over the last year or two trying to help tell the story of cotton. I even tried to put the basics of the crop in a cotton 101 series of posts. I have been able to talk about all sorts of things but I keep thinking something is missing and I realized, its the stories of other people…. people like Steve who have spent most of their lives growing the fiber and people like a friend who told me that one of the things that reminds her of her dad who died too young is a paisley handkerchief or a bride-to-be who had her daddy grow the perfect crop to surround her nuptials. These people all feel the fabric of our lives in a way that their voices should be heard. I want to share them here on the blog too in a series of guest posts!

Why Write a Guest Post

Whether the cotton connection you have is a fashion show or helping it grow, I’d love to have a glimpse of it here on my blog! I want to celebrate the incredible people who are involved in our favorite fiber’s path to market as well as the ones who enjoy making cotton products a part of their lives. Something so simple connects us all.

I’m thinking about friends who had cotton in their wedding arrangements, people who take photos of their kids out in the crop every year, connecting back to family stories from generations ago. There’s the cotton farmer in California who gave his wife Pima flowers on their first date, cotton ginners who spent months getting the crop ginned, designers who made a classic clothing item new again, textile workers who take pride in making thick cotton towels. If you remember your daughter’s first fashion show and the great cotton jumper she wore, or that blanket that was needed for you to sleep…. the concert shirt you feel 18 again in or that pair of Wranglers George Strait wore when you saw him in concert. I’d like you to share your story about how you connect with cotton. (As you can see here, I regularly share stories of cotton from my cotton 101 series to how much I love hoodies!)

Surely you have some really happy memories that would be fun to share, or something near and dear to your heart that will touch the hearts of the people who read what gets posted here. I know a lot of you don’t share your stories on a blog or YouTube everyday. This would be a great way to just dip your toe in.  I’d love to have a bunch of people share their stories through my blog. And I’ll link them up with this logo I made up.

If you are willing to help me celebrate cotton in a series of posts here on my personal blog, shout either here, on the blog’s Facebook page or send me an email to guestpost at janiceperson dot com (written this way to try & reduce spam). Feel free to tell any friends you think would be interested to join us too! I’d love to have a few posts each week for a couple of months but have to say, this could really be a great series of posts for far longer than a month since there are so many incredible people who have close relationships with cotton! I’ve already written as much here as you’d be committing to!

How to Write a Guest Post

If you haven’t written a blog post before, don’t worry. Its a snap! Here are a few things to get you going:

• Think about the story you want to share & start writing it down! If you are nervous about what to write or how much to write, don’t be. There is no real rule (yes, this is part of the reason I love blogging!) A guideline to consider for length is 500 words, but really you want to tell a complete story so shorter or longer is fine. Remember the people who read this blog have a wide range of backgrounds, it may be good to reread the post & think about whether you are using any words you may want to explain. If you don’t write a lot, maybe you want to ask someone to give it a look. I am willing to help you be sure your best foot is put forward if you like.
• Find a few photos that help tell the story. With the wonders of digital, its amazing what you can do for photos. If you are talking about an event, we’d love to see it. If you refer to that poodle skirt your mom wore in high school, we’d love to see it too! Snapping a quick photo with your mobile phone is an option, you don’t have to have a really expensive camera though with a few folks I’m sure I’ll have great photos, there is a full spectrum for a reason.
• Prepare a short bio with links to your social media sites as applicable. And a photo.
• Send it on in! You can get in the cue by sending to jplovescotton at janiceperson dot com.
  

Any Questions?

Guest Posts Written for the Series (so Far)

Why would a farmer plant GMO cotton?

Cotton is the Fabric of the Classroom for @HouseAgBuilt

Wanted: Job that Pays Well for Napping / Cocooning in Comfort

It been a couple of years since a college kid seemed to stumble into my social media world. Okay, other college kids stumble in, but this one — Kelly Rivard took up residency! I got to know Kelly through Twitter (@kmrivard) and before long she was appearing all around me! Facebook, Skype, the now nearly […] Continue Reading

The post What is it that you love about cotton? Please join a series of cottony goodness! appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.