A Stitch Through Time

The Market Revolution began with the advancement in manufacturing. In 1793, inventor Eli Whitney developed a machine known as the Cotton Gin. This was used to separate cotton from cotton seeds rather than do it manually. This development revolutionized agriculture and factory work, and unfortunately also led to a mass exploitation of African-American slaves. With an increase of machinery, the Boston Manufacturing Company was created by Francis Lowell as a place for all

The earliest crochet was made by using fingers, rather than the hooks used today. The history can be traced back to the early 1500 BC, as part of nun’s work, which included needlepoint lace and bobbin lace. (Bardum)

8. John Deere’s steel plow, as well as McCormick’s mechanized reaper, allowed farmers to get more harvested a t a faster pace and without the strenuous amount of labor usually needed. Eli Whitney also created the cotton gin as well as interchangeable parts which would be easier, faster, and cheaper to replace than regular machines.

According to document 6, a chart of inventors who made changes in textile-machinery, England was equipped with the needed thinkers to change the machinery in order for the revolution to go into effect. The inventors include, Richard Arkwright, Edward Cartwright, and Eli Whitney. These inventors made the water frame, power loom, and the cotton gin, tools necessary to mass produce textile products. These brilliant machines allowed for England to outcompete its rivals in trade and bring in a great cash influx through mass production. According to document 7, a chart of inventors who made changes in agriculture, England was also equipped with thinkers who could industrialize agriculture.

4. One very crucial machine shaped life in the South. Separating the seeds from a cotton was a slow process and planters needed a better way to clean cotton. To solve the planters’ problem, a young Connecticut school teacher, Eli Whitney, invented a machine that had two rollers with thin wire teeth, which would separate the seeds from the fibers when cotton was swept between the rollers. This gave workers an advantage from other workers. For example, a person using a

This useful device made it much easier to produce string and yarn from raw cotton, strong enough to serve as the warp thread in looms. With a few investors he built several mills across England and Scotland to produce yarn for massed-produced clothing which made him one of the largest names of his time. He showed unusual ability to organise and systematize work into large, coordinated factories. He also built cottages near his mills to house his workers. Furthermore, the ability to lower the cost of producing clothing boosted the

To make the cloth the mill girls would put cotton on their spinning wheel to make thread. Then they would put the thread on a bobbin which the doffers (bobbin girls) brought to the weavers. Then the thread gets weaved into finished cloth which would then be

Eli Whitney's machine could produce up to 23 kg (50 lb) of cleaned cotton daily, making southern cotton a profitable crop for the first time, but Whitney failed to profit from his invention, imitations of his machine appeared, and his 1794 invention was not upheld until 1807.

     Eli Whitney's machine was the first to clean short-staple cotton. His cotton engine was made of spiked teeth that were on a revolving cylinder which when turned by a crank, pulled the cotton fiber through small openings to separate the seeds from the lint.                                    L-ter on, the gins became horse-drawn and were powered by water. As a result, the cotton was being produced at a much faster pace. The price of cotton also decreased. Cotton soon became the number one selling good.

The only type of cotton that grew where he was had sticky green seeds that took a lot of time to pick out from the fluffy white cotton. He then decided he wanted to find a solution to this problem, and knew he wanted to invent some type of machine, because then he could apply to the government for

In 1830, Barthelemy Thimmonier, a French tailor, patented the first functional sewing machine that used a hooked embroidery-type needle to produce a chain stitch. However, in 1841, after successfully using his machines to mass produce army clothing, his production facility was destroyed and he was almost killed by other tailors in the town who were angry and threatened by the machine’s efficiency and utility. In America during the early 1830’s, a New York inventor, Walter Hunt, produced the first sewing machine that created a lockstitch. As a result, thinking changed and duplication of the human hand stitch was no longer the standard that inventors were measured by. Hunt at that time did not see the promise of his invention and did not file for a patent to protect it. He sold his interest for a small fee. (Museum of American Heritage, 2010).

Culturally, the symbolism of a quilt is understood to be an heirloom piece that is closely guarded and highly prized. The ownership of the quilt and the generational lines it passes down is known before the piecing is begun. Stitching the pieces together is done by groups of women. The tiny bits of cloth each carry a memory, one from grandpa's shirt, one square from an aunt's Christmas dress, a piece from the flannel nightgown a mother wore as she pulled her sick child close to her bosom. The pieces are carefully and artistically pieced together into a collage of

There were two key inventions that had a huge impact on the Industrial Revolution. John Kay, an English engineer invented the flying shuttle. They flying shuttle was a machine that made cotton workers capable of weaving much faster. Kay received the patent for the flying shuttle on May 26, 1733. Thirty-one years late in 1764, an English carpenter name James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny. This machine multiplied the amount of yarn produced. The only setback was that the spinning jenny produced only one type of yarn needed for weaving (Bruno 158). Then another inventor, Richard Arkwright, made the water frame. This invention made it possible to produce the other type of yarn needed and required much waterpower. The new spinning machine that Arkwright invented was made of a frame, which was too large and too expensive to fit in a small cottage. In The Timetable of Technology, it states that Arkwright is the founder of the modern factory. He is named the founder because he built a house for his new water frame, and then employed one thousand people to work the spinning machine. This new factory started operating in

In “A Scrap or Time and Other Stories”, Fink 's writings challenge this idea of restraints of moral behavior on critical situations, for example those who were either compelled or forced to go to Germany to do “charitable” labor for the Reich. The question really was, can they be judged by standards that overcome in these ceasefire societies? Fink tells individual stories in a modest way, in the sense that she seems to avoid using ordinary words. Instead, she uses images, symbols, and metaphors, especially those originating from nature to highlight these facts that allude to the overall picture of the short stories. This can be seen in the opening story, “A Scrap of Time, "The Garden That Floated Away," and "A Spring Morning." This very sense of symbolism and metaphors as well as the minute details throughout the stories as a whole aid in providing a coherent pieces that allows the reader to distinguish the fact that many of the stories are not only interrelated but written by the same author. In the stories, many of the people mentioned are influenced by two types of memory the flat one which records the predictable everyday events, and the jagged one which influences deeply into the unconscious layers of the mind. In “A Scrap of Time” this very essence of a flat memory that described the predictable was quite evident within the first couple of paragraphs, “I had left my house after eating a perfectly normal breakfast, at a table that was set in a normal way.” (pg. 4)

One sunny spring day, Rachel arrived home from a long day of school. As she set down her backpack, she casually walked to the kitchen to begin preparing a snack. When she was opening the cabinet door she saw an odd looking light coming from the kitchen window. She also heard a small bang and the neighbor’s dogs begin to bark. She thought to herself what the light and noise could have been. It was too bright to be headlights from the neighbor's car or really anything else. Rachel slowly approached the door to her backyard, slightly afraid of when she will find outside.