Selfsufficientish.com

Please Help!

My name is Tate and I am a 5th grade teacher in the US, in North Carolina. I have recently started a garden and I am going to grow cotton to help make the curriculum real and to teach sustainability. It is amazing how difficult it is to find a gin around us. I was looking for plans for a cotton gin and stumbled upon this web site. Thanks Nev for posting your "Making a Cotton Gin" article. Nev or anyone else, I was wondering if you could post a link to the picture of the cotton gin that you were referring to. Or better yet, a picture of a gin that was built from Nev's plans.

Thanks!

Tate

Hello and welcome to Ish!

I suggest you send a PM to Nev (his user name is Wombat) as he doesn't come on the site every day and may not see this message. Good luck with the cotton growing!

Hey Tate!

I have returned your PM. PM me your email and I will email the photo's I have of mine, can't find the other one!

Nev

Hiya! I'd be very interested in seeing photos of the cotton gin as well, Wombat, are you able to post them in the article at all?

Cotton grows wild up here around Darwin, and hand-ginning is -very- tedious. I'm not sure, but I suspect that wild cotton has more seeds than cultivated. It's the short-fibre form of Gossypium hirsuta, white.

I'd love to grow some of the coloured fibres! Green, caramel, all those colours! Darwin's the perfect climate for cotton. Long dry period, long wet period, hot.

I'm not sure what to do with the cotton yet, but I know I want to dye it with local dyes (indigo grows wild around Darwin too, as well as a whole bunch of native dye plants).

I will have to scour the cotton to get rid of the wax, which is why I am reluctant to spin off the boll, as scouring and dyeing the loose fibres first get a deeper colour than on the spun raw stuff. Does anyone have any suggestions/clues for the best way to scour loose fibres? I guess I'll have to card it at some stage, I have some hand carders from Virginia Woolworks (love that place!) but I think the teeth aren't fine enough for cotton.

Hi
I've no idea what any of you guys are talking about but welcome to our newbies anyway. When I saw the title of this thread, I thought it related to making gin from cotton. Oh well, never mind.

Cheers

Zoe

Better luck next time thomzo

Welcome to the new members - If you go to the welcome area and tell us about yourselves you'll get loads more welcomes - only the boozers will come to this thread apparently