Cotton to Cloth

Prior to the industrial revolution most cloth was made in the home. carding spinning

Looms The bigger the loom, the wider the cloth which can be made.

Dying wool is the same process as dying cotton at home.

If you didn’t have the tool or the skill to complete part of the process, you would barter with a friend or neighbor to get the work done. A big loom allows for larger pieces of cloth but takes up a lot of space.

Slowly people began to send parts of the process out of the house to be completed. Small mills had always been a part of the local village or town. Most of these were grist or saw mills. Now people were building mills to do some of the tedious labor of textile making.

Carding machine at the local mill.

Did you know that in the early days of the industrial revolution that the textile mills were powered by water from falls like this one?

This is a small bale of cotton. There is a standard size for cotton bales. Cotton arrived in the North in the form of cotton bales to be transformed into cloth.

The next few slides show you the basic process for turning bolls of cotton into bolts of cloth in a factory setting.

1 - Picking

2 - Carding

3 - Drawing

4 - Roving

5 - Spinning

6 - Dressing

7 – Warping & Drawing-in

8 - Weaving

9 - Finishing

10 – Baling … again!

Although you can’t read them all in this photograph, there are a lot of jobs which need to be done in a textile mill!

The weaving room.