I started my business providing cotton to handspinners and weavers in 1995. At that time, there were many small labs that would work with me to make blends for spinners. Today, they are few and far between, but in the early days, I was able to offer intimate blends of cotton with silk, wool, cria, flax, and hemp, and I also had a number of striped slivers in various colors. At one point, I worked with a very small mill that humored me, but each time I called, he would ask, “What kind of a cockamamie thing do you want now?” Luckily, he ran them for me anyway.
The terminology for cotton preparations is different from that for wool; for example, “roving” in wool-speak is “sliver” when referring to cotton.…