A historic Levi Strauss ad painted on the side of a building in Jacksonville, Oregon

I was just scanning through some things and saw this bit of history from Cotton Inc:

On May 20, 1873, an American icon was born when Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis were given a patent for their copper rivet fasteners for denim trousers. The blue jean has since secured its place in American culture and in world fashion as a “go to” garment. Changing fashion styles and attitudes altered the look of the blue jean over time, but until recently, the blue jean had remained true blue to its cotton origins. The recent influx of man-made fibers into blue jeans is not a good fit for many consumers, and could affect the care, wear and expected five-year longevity of their beloved blue jeans.

Seriously? Today is the birthday of blue jeans? And I’m stuck here wearing a sundress? Granted, I have on a denim jacket but wow, am I bummed I didn’t know this when I got dressed this morning.

The history of denim as being all cotton, comfortable and crazy durable earned it a spot quickly with folks who work hard physically like farmers and pioneers of the west. Denim and the beloved American blue jeans have continued to catch on and now you can find really expensive fashion jeans or cheaper work cuts. And when traveling in some foreign countries, I have found taking someone a pair of 501s is the fastest way to their heart!

I have to say, while the addition of a small amount of spandex or something to cotton to help jeans keep their shape, Cotton Inc hits the nail on the head when it comes to denim that includes higher percentages of man-made fibers.

CI’s Kim Kitchings says “Consumers love denim. We know from our Lifestyle Monitor data that U.S. consumers own an average of seven denim items and wear jeans an average of four days a week. We also know that 60% of consumers would pay a little extra to get more cotton back into those jeans.”

I definitely have more denim pieces in my wardrobe than the average Joe, but I can tell you the jeans I have with more synthetic fibers… they don’t come out of the closet much. They are not as comfortable, they don’t breathe with my body and they just don’t have that comfy feeling my other jeans do. I tried something different in buying one or two pair and I didn’t like it. My cotton awareness and prioritization though is unique according to CI:

Some fault may actually lie with the consumers and what Kitchings calls “label apathy.” “Today’s consumers have been wearing jeans most of their lives and are familiar with how to care for them,” says Kitchings. “The rules change when there are higher percentages of one or more man-made fibers.” Kitchings points to Lifestyle Monitor data that reveal less than half of consumers check the fiber content or laundry care labels when purchasing a garment.

So, I have to tell you, take the time to read labels and think about what’s on them. You may also want to follow these tips from CI’s Vikki Martin who says, “Always check the labels for fiber content information and care instructions; knowing what you’re getting and how to care for it will help extend the life of your jeans or any garment.”

Martin has the following tips on proper denim care:

• Before laundering, always check the sewn-in tag for specific care instructions.

• Invest in quality detergent to help extend the life of denim jeans.

• To preserve the color of denim jeans (especially dark washes), turn them inside out before laundering, then line dry.

• If denim jeans are overly stiff, soak them overnight in a washing machine with water and a cupful of fabric softener. Run the load normally the next morning.

• If denim jeans are not dirty but need a boost: wet them with water, let them spin in the washer, and then tumble or line dry.

You can see the original release Majority of Consumers Bothered By Man-made Fibers in Their Denim on the Cotton Incorporated website.

The post The Day Blue Jeans Were Born — Celebrating Levi Strauss & Denim appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

This is another one of the “no brainer” posts for my 30 days of thanks series. I am sure some of you were beginning to wonder whether I was going to wait and make this my grand crescendo at the end or something, but I have to admit, that I’m not really that organized! LOL!

Why am I thankful for cotton?

As I type this up, I am sitting in my home, finally just relaxing. It has been a crazy busy couple of weeks and it feels a bit like my sofa is a long lost friend! When I got home, I needed to start some laundry, etc. I changed into some comfy flannel pajamas and dang if the sense of the relaxation didn’t IMMEDIATELY set in! I mean putting on a pair of pjs totally changed my mindset. That’s the touch the feel of cotton and happiness!

Who do I have to thank for cotton?

There is a long list of people who are involved in getting these pjs to someone like me! We frequently forget to think about the origins of things around us… I mean you can’t possibly think through all of this stuff all the time! But for me, I tend to be a bit more aware of the cotton chain than some because I have friends that are links along the way! You can always see my Cotton 101 page and cotton posts if you want to learn more.

I have worked in the cotton seed business since the mid 90s. That puts me in a place where I get to see the very beginning of it all! I know cotton breeders who are out there working to make better seed for cotton farmers. That seed is what farmers plant to produce lots of cotton bolls. Those bolls get harvested and then taken to the cotton gin where ginners separate the seed from the lint. The bales of cotton we all have heard so much about, then go to a warehouse (warehousemen) where they are stored til a marketing cooperative or merchant sells them to textile manufacturers! And eventually they show up in stores with familiar labels or price tags.

How much did cotton farmers grow this year?

I took a little time to get some numbers together…. First, I looked at the August 2013 Crop Production Report, you see that the 2013 crop was forecast to hit 12.9 million bales (480 pound bales). That means we are down from last year quite a bit — 26 percent in fact! A really major factor in this was planted area. See, in 2012, there were more than 12.3 million acres of cotton planted and this year there were only 10.3 million acres planted to cotton but it is also important to note that there is also expected to be a drop in pounds harvested per are too. In fact, it is a statistically significant drop of 91 pounds per acre.

When you look at them, this will be the smallest cotton crop U.S. farmers have harvested in the last 5 years!

Where Heroes Are Made

The team at Deltapine (where I spent more than a decade) is celebrating cotton farmers too! They did this really great song with a group of Nashville musicians who wrote a song called “Where Heroes are Made.” The music video is available now and it features a cotton farmer I know from Georgia — Chuck Coley! Here the story of how Chuck’s family farm has transitioned over the generations as he and his son talk about the family’s history in one of the behind the scenes videos. And yes, I love that the song was written by a Memphis guy!

Related articles

• Our Cotton Plant
• First Freeze Threatens Cotton Crop
• GA Cotton Harvest Off to Late Start

The post Thankful for Cotton & The Folks Who Plant it & Get it to Me! appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

This weekend, I drove to Memphis to visit family and eat awesome barbecue. And on both my drive down and drive back home to St. Louis, I got distracted by the cotton fields along the highway…. and yes, I had to stop! I mean really. Stopping in random cotton fields to see what’s happening that I may be able to share with others…. it’s a #cottongeek’s dream. and I even shot some video which is perfect since YouTube is hosting geek week! And it’s great to have a new post in my cotton 101 series!

So, in this video, I show you how cotton breeders make the cross-pollination that ultimately lead to new cotton varieties. Now let me put a disclaimer here… this is just a glimpse at some of the tactics. The real know-how is deciding what parents to use, what traits to screen for, how to test to determine the varieties viability, etc… but this is something that helps you understand how cotton flowers work.

This is what we call a candlestick on a cotton plant. The bud that will produce a beautiful white bloom the following day.

If someone like me doesn’t mess with the bud, the next day it will open up and be a beautiful cream color. The flower has both male and female parts so it can pollinate itself. On this flower, you can see it actually has begun to get a little pink. That means it has been pollinated!

By the next day, the cotton bloom will turn a beautifully rich pink!

BUT cotton breeders find candlesticks the morning before they open and emasculate them. That means they pull off all the male parts — lots of little pollen sacks that will burst open in the afternoon (you can see some on my fingernails LOL). By pulling those off, they leave the female parts which will be ready to be pollinated in the afternoon. That’s when they come back with an open bloom from the other parent plant and put the pollen on!

Hope you liked the video & photos! What do you think about cotton blooms? I think they are gorgeous! They do make me happy!

The post Cotton 101 Video: How to Cross Pollinate Two Cotton Plants appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

After writing more than 100 blog posts on cotton, it can be fun to watch posts keep showing up in my stats. There are a few posts that seem to show up frequently. They are posts that help explain things people may be interested in or that people find here or there and want to share with others. Since I moved the blog from my previous webhost (note to all – I suggest you steer clear of inmotion hosting), I think its’ really interesting to see which posts are getting the most traffic! Here are my Top 10 posts about my favorite fiber — cotton! 

Cotton 101: What does a cotton plant or field look like?

I love that my top viewed cotton post was something I put together as a response to a friend’s tweet two years ago! The friend was asking whether it was possible he was seeing cotton in the field when he was far from his Midwestern home. It was! I wrote a post including photos from planting, early season, mid-season, fruiting, harvest time and post harvest. With each photo I talk through some of the key things happening on cotton farms.

Top 10 Cotton States in Area, Production, Yield & Value

This is a newer post — written in August 2012 — and contains some key numbers about cotton by states. The data included in this post include:

• Top 10 Cotton States in Acreage / Area to Harvest in 2012
• Top 10 Cotton States in Production / Total Number of Bales in 2012
• Top 10 Cotton States Per Acre Production / Yield in Pounds Per Acre in 2012
• Value of Cotton by State

Since those are 2012 numbers, I am thinking I will do similar posts on an annual basis. I did a look forward to 2013 cotton acres a bit ago that seems to be really popular.

Cotton 101: How a Cotton Gin Works

We all learned about cotton gins and Eli Whitney in elementary school but somewhere along the way, a bunch of us have forgotten what a cotton gin is for since then. The gin is where cotton farmers take their crop to have the cotton lint separated from the seed so it can go to textile mills and become clothes, towels, etc.

What’s the Fabric of our Lives About? Why Advertise Cotton?

I love when I am watching TV and I hear someone singing “the touch the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives.” In fact I love it so much, that it is sometimes my ringtone! But what leads Hayden Pannettiere or Zoe Deschanel to sing about cotton and who pays them to do it? Seems that’s something other people have wondered before and they search Google to find out. Some of them find my blog in the process.

Why Would a Farmer Put a Sign on a Cotton, Corn or Soybean Field?

When you drive down the backroads of America, or even the interstate in rural areas, people sometimes see a sign on the edge of a farm field. Some fo us aren’t sure what those are for and some make assumptions about what they mean. But farmers do that as a sign for each other, this post helps explain all of that.

Cotton 101: Can you eat cotton or cottonseed?

People will joke about being so hungry they could eat something as unappetizing as cardboard, but could you ever eat cottonseed if you were really hungry? Its a yes and no answer that you may want to know more about before biting in.

Understanding the Boll Weevil’s Impact Looking Forward

The mean ol’ boll weevil is probably the one cotton bug that more people have heard of than any but for those of us in the US, we should know it’s not even native to the US! It came here years ago and American farmers want it to go home to Central America. Here’s what’s on the minds of those farmers as they look to the future.

Cotton 101: What’s Cottonseed Used for?

Products made with cotton fiber / lint is really well understood. Most of us have cotton sheets & towels, jeans & t-shirts, etc. But what happens to cottonseed when it leaves the cotton gin? Well there are several things.  

Cotton 101: Facts about Cotton — The Crop & Products

This is a post that provides some of the trivia — bits and pieces of things that I think are interesting about cotton. Yeah, I am a total cotton geek!

A Million Bales of Cotton Impact From One Small Town

When a cotton gin in Arkansas hit the milestone of ginning one million bales of cotton, it got me thinking about the contributions of this small town that most Americans had never heard of. How much cotton is one million bales and how many pieces of clothing would that make for folks in a big city?

What am I missing?

Looking at all of that,

The post Top 10 Blog Posts About Cotton in 2013 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.

When I was thinking about doing this, it was letters like Q, X and Z that made me wonder if I could really do it. The video I shot as I showed a friend around Memphis came to mind quickly. Although Steve had worked in cotton for years off and on, seeing how cotton was tested for quality was new for him. As he soaked up all the things that he was being told. I wandered around shooting photos and video but somehow I failed to share it.

It’s important to note that while I have never worked for the USDA classing cotton, I worked in Mississippi for a dozen years at a company that was breeding Deltapine cotton varieties for farmers and one of the important pieces of the research & development program was having a proprietary fiber testing lab.

This lab enabled us to test fiber more quickly than if it had to go into the line with all the samples going to the USDA labs. And although the lab wasn’t run by the USDA, it tested itself and submitted blind tests to the USDA for analysis to remain calibrated. This lab was one of the favorite spots on site tours. For a couple of reasons, one was seeing how this is done up close is just cool and the other was how awesomely comfortable it was with the constant temperature & humidity (something Mississippi is not known for!)

Every Bale is Sampled and Tested

Last year, US cotton farmers produced an estimated 17 million bales of cotton for use in a variety of products from jeans to dollar bills. As farmers harvest & gin that cotton, they know how much they have in approximately 480 pound bales but farmers won’t know how much their crop is worth until the lint is classified by the USDA fiber testing labs. The fiber quality testing or classification is important so that textile mills will be able to target the fiber they need for various types of textiles.

Cotton gins from across the Cotton Belt pull small samples from each bale and the barcode tag that is placed on that bale has a stub that goes with the sample to the classing office.

How the Labs Work

The classing labs bring in samples from gins in their area, bags full of samples arrive and each sample it taken out and allowed to adjust to the consistent temperature and humidity. This is really important because cotton’s elasticity and other factors can change if the cotton is wetter or drier. It works just like our t-shirts. Think about how much more a t-shirt will stretch out if you try to stretch it straight out of the shower vs how much it stretches out if you’ve been sweating in it for a while!

Cotton Quality Tests Run

Once the cotton is at the specific temperature and humidity, technicians run a variety of tests that will help cotton merchants and buyers. The parameters include:

• Length 
• Uniformity
• Micronaire
• Strength
• Color
• Trash/Foreign Matter

Questions on Fiber Quality?

R, S, T, U & the Rest of the Alphabet Coming Soon!

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! I’m pretty pumped about getting caught back up here and getting this on its merry way!

Related articles

• How Much Cotton is in That Field or Module?
• Cotton Rally Encouraging Farmers to Sow More Than USDA Forecast – Bloomberg
• Alabama cotton producers look to improve on record-high 2012 yields
• Top Cotton Blogs You Should be Following

The post Fiber Quality Testing on Every Bale of US Cotton VIDEO appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

The cotton crop is nearing harvest and as you can see this field is no longer putting on flowers, the leaves are turning brown and maroon and beginning to drop and more bolls are opening. The field is in Hayti, Missouri.

Unlike the video I shared recently that showed blooms at the top of the plant, this field has stopped putting on new flowers and is focused on opening the remaining immature bolls. Another thing you can see has changed in the crop is the leaves are browning (kind of marooning really). This leads to defoliation and can happen naturally as frost hits or farmers can use crop protection products that encourage defoliation earlier than naturally would occur.

One reason this is important is if the mechanical picker were to go through the field with healthy green leaves, the plant would end up staining the fiber which would lead to a reduction in quality. After all, mills would need to bleach the fiber or something to get out the “grass stain” that would be on the lint before it even went to the gin. And the problem would just keep getting worse as the bales went to be spun into yarn or woven/kit into textiles.

Knowing this, cotton is graded based on color and the amount of foreign matter in the lint after its been ginned. Those grades are a key part of determining the price a farmer receives per pound.

The post Cotton 101 Video: Field Nearing Harvest & Importance of Defoliation 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.

It has been a little while since I’ve had a guest post in the series of people telling about how cotton is the fabric of their lives. This one has been in the works for a little while though and it is worth the wait. It’s from California elementary school teacher Sarah who blogs at  The House That Ag Built. She has both Twitter (@houseagbuilt) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/houseagbuilt) accounts as well. Thanks Sarah for sharing your story & the story of your students! 

Why I Love Cotton in the Classroom

Guest post by Sarah from The House That Ag Built for Janice the great J

As an elementary school teacher, I know the importance of teaching agriculture.  Society is so far removed from agriculture that many kids and adults alike think that food is made in the store and not grown in the field.  That is sad.  This past school year, I made the decision to step up my agriculture education a notch (or two) and boy am I happy with the results!  There are now 24 kids in my area that know more about agriculture than their parents and most adults in our area.

My first graders did a four-week agriculture unit and our focus was cotton.  We learned the structure of a cotton plant, what a cotton plant needs to grow, where cotton grows in the US, what we use cotton for, and we even got to see cotton that was straight from a farmer’s field!  Cotton is the perfect commodity to teach – even to such young learners!  Cotton is everywhere, it literally surrounds us in the form of clothing, we use it every day in the form of money, and it is found all around our homes in the form of towels, and sheets.

It is easy for kids to make a connection with something that is all around them, both at home and at school.  I LOVE cotton in the classroom! Having my students come up to me as proud as can be declaring that they are wearing cotton was so much fun!  It really brought agriculture to life for my kids.

I could go on and on about all my proud moments with cotton in my classroom, but I will let my students work show just how much they retained 7 months later.  I told them to write why cotton is important and here is what they did:

“I love cotton because I have my best coat and it is made out of cotton.  I almost wear it every day because it is my best shirt (coat) ever in my life and I have a lot of blankets at home and cotton is important too.”

“I like cotton because it makes pillows and I play pillow fight, and (cotton) gives me socks I love to wear.  And one more thing they (cotton) make me my favorite shoes.”  My 6-year-old student made the connection from cotton to pillows to having a pillow fight; cotton = fun!  They are so adorable!

“I love cotton because the cows eat cotton seeds and then they give milk and the milk goes to the dairy and the dairy makes ice cream!  I love cotton!  And I love cotton because my favorite shirt is made of cotton; my shirt is warm too.  I love cotton very very very much! Thank you!”  My favorite connection!  It is pretty cool that they can explain how cotton and ice cream relate!

“The important (thing about cotton) is that cotton gives us pillows and I love to sleep when I am so tired and cotton is so fuzzy and cotton makes money and I love to do a pillow fight and my blanket it is so fuzzy and it is blue and even plants of cotton. I love cotton.  Cotton is so important for us.  I love cotton so much if we didn’t have cotton we wouldn’t have clothes and pillow fights! I love cotton so so so much.” This writing is all over the place but when she was reading it to me after, she was so excited that she knew so much about cotton products!  She even remembered that money is made out of cotton.

A few of the picture my students drew on the back of their papers:

Cotton makes dollars (aka money).

Cotton makes sheets and clothes.

They even remembered how to draw a cotton plant and the boll.

As you can see cotton is lots of fun to teach in an elementary classroom.  My students and I love cotton in the classroom because it is easy to relate to and creates lasting agricultural literacy.

Thank you for having me Janice!

I love it! And think its awesome how much the kids remembered from one time of year to another! 

Related articles

• If it feels good, wear it!

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• Cotton 101: Saw My First Cotton Plants for the 2012 Season

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The post Cotton is the Fabric of the Classroom for @HouseAgBuilt appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

One of the things I really got used to the last several years is seeing cotton seed and plants throughout the season. Its amazing how much I miss it when I live somewhere else. I’ve lived other places before and was able to keep up on the crop and with social media, I have lots of people willing to help me stay up-to-date on the crop in various areas, but its not the same. So when I was back in Memphis recently, I decided to take the backroads for a while rather than popping on the Interstate and making a bee-line out of town. I didn’t see many cotton fields on this trip, but once I was able to row a field (that means see rows of plants from the highway), I turned in and decided to take some photos and soak up a little of my favorite fiber!

Related articles

• Planting Considerations
• Thinking through Selecting Cotton Varieties
• Planting Cotton in California
• What does a cotton plant look like?
• more related posts on the Cotton 101 page

The post Cotton 101: Saw My First Cotton Plants for the Season appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.