Before the war most articles of clothing were purchased in the North or imported from abroad. Now that the blockade shut Alabama off from all sources of supply, the people had to make their cloth and clothing at home. The factories in the South could not even supply the needs of the army, and there was a universal return to primitive and frontier conditions. Old wheels and looms were brought out, and others were made like them. The state government bought large quantities of cotton and wool cards for the use of poor people. The women worked incessantly. Every household was a small factory, and in an incredibly short time the women mastered the intricacies of looms, spinning-wheels, warping frames, swifts, etc. Negro women sometimes learned to spin and weave. The whites, however, did most of it; weaving was too difficult for the average negro to learn. The area devoted to the cultivation of cotton was restricted by law, but more than enough was raised to supply the few factories then operating, principally for the government, and to supply the spinning-wheels and hand looms of the people. As a rule, each member of the family had a regularly allotted task for each day in spinning or weaving. The young girls could not weave, but could spin;[638] while the women became expert at weaving and spinning and made beautiful cloth. All kinds of cotton goods were woven, coarse osnaburgs, sheetings, coverlets, counterpanes, a kind of muslin, and various kinds of light cloth for women's dresses. Wool was grown on a large scale as the war went on, and the women wove flannels, plaids, balmorals, blankets, and carpets.[639] Gray jeans was woven to make clothing for the soldiers, who had almost no clothes except those sent them by their home people. A soldier's pay would not buy a shirt, even when he was paid, which was seldom the case. Nearly every one wove homespun, dyed with home-made dyes, and it was often very pretty. The women took more pride in their neat homespun dresses than they did before the war in the possession of silks and satins. And there was friendly rivalry between them in spinning and weaving the prettiest homespun as there was in making the whitest sugar, the cleanest rice, and the best wheat and corn. But they could not make enough cloth to supply both army and people, and old clothes stored away were brought out and used to the last scrap. When worn out the rags were unravelled and the short threads spun together and woven again into coarse goods. Pillow-cases and sheets were cut up for clothes and were replaced by homespun substitutes, and window curtains were made into women's clothes. Carpets were made into blankets. There were no blanket factories, and the legislature appropriated the carpets in the capitol for blankets for the soldiers.[640] Some people went to the tanyards and got hair from horse and cow hides and mixed it with cotton to make heavy cloth for winter use, which is said to have made a good-looking garment.