Miniature Spinning as a Fiber Quality Assessment Tool

Miniature spinning has long been used to assess cotton varieties in a timely manner.  It has been an accepted fact that the quality of miniature spinning is less than optimal, but that it allows a direct comparison between cottons during varietal studies.  Recently, researchers have made processing improvements to the traditional miniature spinning process which allows for small samples (less than 100 grams) to be processed quickly while producing yarn qualities that approach commercial-scale textile processing traits. Full-scale carding and drawing equipment was modified to produce optimum quality textile products.  Fiber quality changes may be tracked through opening, carding, and drawing as the fiber is processed into ring spun yarns.  Yarn testing methods have been investigated to move beyond the traditional practice of using skein break data only to compare varieties.