
The manufacture of cotton thread

The work of the weavers is not limited to weaving: they are also the ones who grow the cotton and carry out the multiple operations necessary to transform it into thread! Once the cotton plant fruits are harvested, these balls of white fibers similar to wool, they still have to be dried in the sun and then ginned. That's not all: the cotton is then untangled and cleaned. In this article, we offer you a focus on carding.
This group of Lao weavers share the tasks necessary for making cotton threads.
From plant to cotton thread: hand carding
What is it? Once clean, The cotton is carded, that is to say it is transformed into a regular sheet of fibers, so as to facilitate the spinning that follows. Little by little, this sheet is brushed so as to make the cotton fibers parallel. It gradually takes on the appearance of a ribbon, which is itself stretched into a wick. To card the cotton manually, we use a tool called a hand carder, a kind of brush. This is an essential step: without carding, the cotton thread would be coarse and fragile!
To begin, Pang separates the cotton flower from the seeds.
Then the weaver cards the cotton by hand.
Detail: hand carding of local white cotton flowers.
Development of the weaving program: the carding machine
To facilitate their production work, Opportunity for Women has equipped the weavers of the Dien Bien Phu cooperative (Vietnam) with a carding machine thanks to a grant from the Agir Sa Vie foundation, as well as your donations to our association on Hello Asso . Thank you! Thanks to this machine, the cotton fiber sheet passes through cylinders equipped with metal tips, which shape a homogeneous material, ready to be spun.
During carding, the weavers protect themselves by wearing a mask and an apron.
Learn more
What's next? Weaving, of course! To learn all about the weavers' creative process and their looms, read the following article on our blog: “How do weavers weave by hand?”