I love finding new bloggers and really love it when one of them finds me and connects! That’s what happened a few weeks ago when an Arkansas woman subscribed to my blog. I looked at her blog and thought “Wow. She seems like so many people I know!” Since then comments and emails have gone back and forth and I’m lucky enough to have my new blogging friend Lacey join my “Cotton – Fabric of Our Lives” series with today’s post.

Lacey says she was “born and raised in eastern Arkansas, agriculture is all I know. In 2006, I married an aerial applicator and we now have two beautiful children. I have recently started a blog called The Ag Wife Diaries. In this blog, I express what it is like to be a pilot’s wife and also tell some of my thoughts on life. My purpose for my blog is to connect with other women.” You can also find her blog through the Facebook page for The Ag Wife Diaries.

Talking back and forth, Lacey pointed out that she and her husband are much more connected to rice than my favorite fiber. But when I explained that my series of guest posts ranges dramatically in knowledge of cotton from shoppers to cotton farmers, she said she had a real passion for cotton and started writing….

The post The Small Joys of Cotton appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I love that my friend Stacy Hadrick (@StacyHadrick on Twitter, she blogs at Our Little Place on the Prairie) was willing to join the “Fabric of Our Lives” series of guest posts!  Stacy is a fifth generation American farmer, mom of 3 amazing kids, and a woman who is happiest when her plate is full. She’s relatively new to blogging where she’s sharing her life on the prairie in rural South Dakota with family and friends. She points out that “When you live an hour from a Wal-Mart it takes a lot of creativity and planning to keep ahead of my group.” LOL! I can only imagine how much time & effort it takes to stay ahead of a household that includes Troy and three kids!

When I have small moments of time to myself (which is so rare!), one of my favorite things to do is to spend time in a fabric store, touching and looking at all the beautiful colors, bolt after bolt of cotton fabric.  It’s in my blood, since I was a little girl I have logged many an hour in fabric stores with my mom, grandma and Aunt Penny. I love looking at pattern books, picking out fabric and feeling the excitement of getting home to start my project.  I remember vividly my mom talking to me about cotton fabric she said: ‘although it wrinkles easy, it’s also easy to sew with, easy to care for and breathes really well’. My first 4-H sewing project was a pair of cotton shorts. Funny, I can remember the shorts but have no idea what ribbon I received.

I’m proud to say that my kids are continuing my love for sewing and cotton fabric.  What is even better in our small community we have an amazing quilt shop.  My youngest daughter, Miss R begs me once a week to take her there. In fact about 6 months ago she got an idea that every morning I could take her to the quilt shop.  She planned on hanging out in the morning before preschool and have Lori (the store owner) then take her to school for her afternoon session.  Miss R was sure I wouldn’t say no. It made me laugh, she likes being at the fabric store so much she came up with this incredible idea. Her plan didn’t work out, but we continue to make regular stops and get our fabric fix.

Miss R and the pillowcase she made

Each of my children have sewed their first cotton item. My oldest son, T has  made many pairs of shorts- camouflage is his favorite color. Miss O has sewed a blanket for her baby cousin.  Miss R has made 3 pillow cases now, for her young age of 4 she loves to sew and is very capable of controlling the sewing machine. With all of my children I have shared the wisdom of my mom about sewing with cotton.

Teigen and the cotton shorts he made for this year's 4-H project

I can’t wait to see all the things we will create through our future sewing projects.  I’m sure we will make amazing memories with yards and yards of colorful cotton fabric.

My chairs that I recovered in different cotton fabrics since I couldn't pick just one. 6 chairs all different fabric.

This post grabs me…. one because my mom and grandmom have always been able to make anything. Really. And somehow me and fabrics connected early but the ability to use a sewing machine without breaking a needle eluded me. My thriving at the coloring outside the lines didn’t mesh too well with working from precise patterns either so I’ve had to freelance some of the things I do and convince someone else to help. Now I’m thinking my indecision over fabric to cover my dining room chairs has an answer – not just one!

I’d love to have more people tell about some of their connections to cotton. If you are interested, here’s how you can guest post here. And don’t forget to check out Stacy’s blog  Our Little Place on the Prairie by starting out with her recipe for blogging. Finally, if you want to know about cotton beyond the fabric used in sewing, check out my Cotton 101 series of posts and you’ll get to see what it looks like on the farm and more!

Related articles

• How to Make Modern Pillowcase Dresses (farmerbloggers.com)
• Refashion: Using your scraps to make a chic top (refashionmama.wordpress.com)
• Summer tops (idealhousewife.wordpress.com)
• Missing for three weeks! (sewconvert.wordpress.com)

The post Cotton & Sewing are a Family Tradition for @StacyHadrick appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

When I started the fabric of our lives series of guest posts, I thought about some of the people who could really help celebrate my favorite natural fiber. oddly, one of the names that came to mind is normally connected to sheep — my friend Sally Colby Scholle who lives in Pennsylvania & has sheep. She tweets as @sheepwriter blogs about it at https://sheepwriter.wordpress.com/. I couldn’t tell if it was really nervy to ask her to write about natural fiber or not so I told her it was fine if wool got equal time, cause she and I both know the various natural fibers all play a role for us. I love the post she came up with too!

If it feels good, wear it!

I was one of those wiggle-worm kids who just couldn’t sit still in school. Every teacher is blessed with a few of us fidgety kids, and I hereby apologize to all of the teachers who had to tolerate my squirminess.

Now I realize that part of the reason I was so restless was because I just couldn’t stand the way my little plaid dresses felt. They were itchy. I didn’t know this at the time, but I’m sure that the reason those dresses didn’t feel quite right is because I was in elementary school when the great new P fabric was introduced.

My mom hit the homemaker jackpot – she no longer had to iron my cute little dresses. I, however, drew the short straw and had to wear itchy clothes.

Somehow I adjusted and made it to junior high, where my home economics teacher assigned a fabric identification project. I was lucky – my mom sewed, and we had a multitude of fabric scraps. I loved learning the names of the pretty cotton fabrics as I carefully stapled them to a piece of poster board … seersucker, chintz, chambray, gingham, denim.

Ahh…denim. With two jobs – farmer and ag writer – I can almost always wear whatever I want. I have old, broken-in jeans that are perfect for whatever I have to do in the barn or in the field. Some have patches, some should have patches, but they’re all comfortable. I love the durability of denim jeans and how they become part of me. I also love denim’s other life as deep-dyed indigo blue for dressy jeans.

In close second for favorite clothing are my cotton t-shirts. The long-sleeved versions are perfect for layering in winter, for in-between weather and for sun protection in summer. Cotton sweatshirts are great for unexpected changes in weather, so I usually keep one in the front of the four-wheeler. When I shop, I always look for the cotton label  – it means clothing that won’t itch, pill or look thin and worn before its time. Although my first choice for everyday wear is a cotton t-shirt, my dressy cotton shirts are the perfect choice for pairing with dark jeans when it’s time to look like something other than a farmer.

Since we raise sheep, all this cotton talk might make me sound like a traitor. But wool is another natural, renewable fiber that, like cotton, has a multitude of uses and blends well with cotton. I often use the sleeves from worn-out cotton sweatshirts to make little coats for chilled lambs. If that isn’t the perfect match, nothing is!

In cotton, I can walk around the pasture checking new lambs, trim hooves, milk goats, ride a horse, work in my garden, meet with farmers at a field day, go shopping, attend an ag meeting or have dinner with friends. What else is there?

Thanks, cotton farmers, for growing my jeans and shirts!

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I’m not sure about you, but I often find myself humming or singing along as someone on TV sings “the touch the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives.” But have you ever stopped to wonder why there are ads for cotton on TV?

Well, its easy enough of an answer. 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 (as you probably guessed, the Zooey Deschanel part of the campaign cause I love her voice and sense of style too).

What a lot of people don’t realize is that cotton farmers pay for those ads as do people who import cotton. It’s a way for these groups to pool funds to support market awareness. It’s fairly easy to understand that farmers would like to keep cotton top of mind and since the makers of all the synthetic fibers like polyester have ad budgets, advertising is part of it. I can certainly remember various fibers — rayon, tencel, etc suggesting they have benefits over natural fiber.

Another part of the financial resources goes to 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. Those activities help provide a return to the people funding the program. It is pretty ingenious and I have to say, for me, the ads provide a look at natural fibers as fashionable and comfortable.

And knowing how much goes into the seal of cotton (all that research in endorsed by farmers), I always feel buying a product that has the familiar cotton logo on it!

If that’s not all reason enough to check into the things cotton farmers are funding, I’ll be a name dropper. Long-time friend in the cotton industry, Louisiana cotton farmer Jay Hardwick currently is serving as the chairman of Cotton Inc. And Jay totally rocks! If you don’t know that, you must have missed the spot America’s Heartland did on Jay Hardwick last year — you really should get caught up on that.

Information for people who enjoy cotton clothes and textiles is available from:

• 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.

Farmers, importers, etc who want information on the programs of Cotton Inc can check out:

• The organization’s activities on a broader basis cottoninc.com — you should also check out the sustainability site at CottonToday
• You can like Cotton Inc on Facebook for info.
• Tweets from @CottonInc

The post What’s the Fabric of our Lives About? Why Advertise Cotton? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Going local has been the buzz in food for a while. And as someone who loves going out to nearby farms and picking my own fruit or to spend a Saturday morning at the farmer’s market, I find myself buying more local food too. But with clothing? Its a lot different than the food discussion. People are wanting less processed foods, they want it in the state it comes off the plant & they’d like to eat it ASAP (which is CRITICAL with some foods like sweet corn if you ask me), but cotton isn’t in a ready to consume state (unless you want to hand gin it, do all the combing, spinning, dyeing, weaving, etc and I’ve met a few people who do that to come up with incredible textiles but the time that takes & the costs if not for yourself is truly amazing).

The US textile business used to have us a fairly local business with small textile mills in many, perhaps even most of the states where cotton is grown. But in the past 15 years, international competition (particularly from China) and consumers desire to buy nearly disposably cheap clothes has put most of the US textile industry out of business or at least encouraged them to relocate to areas of the world where they could produce on an economic scale that makes them competitive at the cash register.

But there are a few people in the Cotton Belt who are looking to change how we look at clothes and a recent article from CNN tells us about a concept under development in North Carolina. And the return of acres to cotton from grain may just provide additional fiber that can be used locally. An excerpt of the article follows:

One company hoping to take advantage of this abundance of cotton is TS Designs, a small T-shirt printing company in Burlington. In manufacturing quality T-shirts within the state, TS Designs aims to preserve environmental resources and restore part of the crippled North Carolina textile industry in the process.

Regional farmers and manufacturers have banded together to form Cotton of the Carolinas, a collaboration aimed at promoting the use of locally grown cotton.

“The genesis of Cotton of the Carolinas was this idea that the growing of cotton here in the United States and then exporting that to far-ranging regions of the world, in the long run, just didn’t make sense,” says Sam Moore, an adviser to TS Designs.

Moore, along with friend and TS Designs President Eric Henry, made the decision to manufacture T-shirts from cotton grown, ginned, spun, knit, finished, cut, sewn, printed and dyed all within the state’s borders.

“The transportation distance of a conventional T-shirt that you buy in a big box store can vary drastically. If China is involved, then you’re talking, as the crow flies, at least 17,000 miles,” says Eric Michel, the company’s vice president of operations.

“Our shirts go from dirt to shirt in less than 700 miles. That’s actually including roads and not as the bird flies.”

TS Designs has three main objectives for Cotton of the Carolinas: to reduce the transportation footprint, to support jobs in North Carolina and to have a transparent supply chain. “We can build an entire supply chain here in North Carolina,” Michel says.

TS Design’s first step in achieving these goals was to call Ronnie Burleson. (HundredPercentCotton note — photo above is from a subsequent visit to Ronnie’s farm.)

“They wanted to convince us that this was a good thing and (that we should) be a part of it. I said, ‘Sure,’ ” Burleson recalls. “If I can support my neighbor and they can support me, then I think that’s a good thing for all of us.”

via Locally grown clothes go from ‘dirt to shirt’ – CNN.com.

Would you be willing to look at the tags & consider something you knew came from dirt to shirt right here in the US or even better, from a group of farmers right down the road? What if they cost more?

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