3. See if you can spin a piece of carded wool. Perhaps you can card some wool with the hand cards which your great grandmother used, as the Pleasant Valley girls did. 4. Try to collect pictures of spinning. The primitive peoples did this in different ways. LESSON 4 THE SPINNING OF COTTON INTO YARN How the manufacturer turns the cotton into yarn ready for the weaver. This is called spinning. Shall we study how it is done? Perhaps there is some one in your class who has visited a spinning mill and can tell how cotton is cleaned and made ready for weaving. This is what the girls of the Sewing League of Pleasant Valley saw the day they went to visit the mill. The Camp Fire girls went the same day, and Miss Ashly, their guardian, said that what they learned would count as an honor. [Illustration: FIG. 45.--The cotton carding machine, which cleans the cotton.] [Illustration: _Courtesy of Leonard & Green, Boston._ FIG. 46.--A cotton spinning room.] =How cotton is prepared for spinning.= The girls went to the lower floor where the cotton is received. They saw the bags and iron bands removed and the cotton pulled apart by a queer machine called a cotton opener, or bale breaker, for you remember the cotton was pressed very hard before being shipped. The cotton is then placed in pickers, or machines which blow it apart and blow out the leaves and dust and dirt. As the cotton leaves this machine, it looks like a big piece (6 ft. wide) of cotton batting rolled in a large roll. It looks soft and clean. Then the girls watched the men place this roll at the back of the next machine, called a carding machine (Fig. 45). Here it was cleaned some more; and such a wonderful thing happened. As it left the machine instead of coming out as a lap of the roll of cotton like it went in, it came out in a long thick coil which looked like a rope, and there were tall round cans ready to receive this continuous line of cotton rope. How soft and beautiful it looked! What wonderful machines the manufacturer had. Some one must have made them. Can you find out who made the first loom run by machinery? John Alden looked it up in the encyclopedia. Do you know who invented the first spinning machine? [Illustration: FIG. 47.--Grandmother Allen's wheel used for spinning wool.] Then the girls visited ever so many machines which wound this cotton rope on spools. Each machine made the rope thinner and finer until it was drawn out as thin and round as the manufacturer wished (Fig. 46). Barbara Oakes noticed this: that these spinning machines not only drew out the cotton rope and made it thinner, but put in a twist which prevented it from breaking so easily. Do you remember how the cotton fiber looked under the microscope? The twist in the fiber helps in the spinning. Isn't it wonderful to think that such tiny fibers can be made into spinning yarns, and yarns woven into cloth? [Illustration: _Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art._