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Making Textiles
The major steps in the manufacture of clothes are four:
first to harvest and clean the fiber or wool; second, to card it and spin it into threads; third, to weave the threads into cloth; and, finally to fashion and sew the cloth into clothes.
Like food and shelter, clothing is a basic human requirement. When
settled neolithic cultures discovered the advantages of woven fibers
over animal hides, the making of cloth, drawing on basketry techniques,
emerged as one of humankind's fundamental technologies. From the
earliest hand-held spindle and distaff and basic hand loom to the highly
automated spinning machines and power looms of today, the principles of
turning vegetable fiber into cloth have remained constant: Plants are
cultivated and the fiber harvested. The fibers are cleaned and aligned,
then spun into yarn or thread. Finally the yarns are interwoven to
produce cloth. Today we also spin complex synthetic fibers, but they are
still woven together the way cotton and flax were millennia ago.
Picking
  
Picking removed foreign matter (dirt, insects, leaves, seeds) from the
fiber. Early pickers beat the fibers to loosen them and removed debris
by hand. Machines used rotating teeth to do the job, producing a thin
"lap" ready for carding.
Carding
  
Carding combed the fibers to align and join them into a loose rope
called a "sliver." Hand carders pulled the fibers between wire teeth set
in boards. Machines did the same thing with rotating cylinders. Slivers
(rhymes with divers) were then combined, twisted, and drawn out into
"roving."
Spinning
  
Spinning twisted and drew out the roving and wound the resulting yarn on
a bobbin. A spinning wheel operator drew out the cotton by hand. A
series of rollers accomplished this on machines called "throstles" and
"spinning mules."
Warping
  
Warping gathered yarns from a number of bobbins and wound them close
together on a reel or spool. From there they were transferred to a warp
beam, which was then mounted on a loom. Warp threads were those that ran
lengthwise on the loom.
Weaving
  
Weaving was the final stage in making cloth. Crosswise woof threads were
interwoven with warp threads on a loom. A 19th century power loom worked
essentially like a hand loom, except that its actions were mechanized.
Source: Lowell National Historical Park Handbook 140
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_making_textiles.htm
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Mary Bellis