Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to another DT lesson with me Mr. Telfer, or Mr.T.

We're going to have a good lesson today, we've got a practical involved as well.

We're going to talk more about that in a moment.

So in today's lesson, we're going to have an exciting time and we're going to be looking at modification of materials.

For the theory part for today's lesson, all you're going to need is your pen and paper or some exercise books and something to write with.

For the practical, you'll be needing a T-shirt or a vest, some old material, fruits and vegetables.

And then you're going to need some jars or containers, a strainer, some pots, and some bowls, and some elastic bands, or maybe some string.

Now we'll talk more about that as I talk you through the practical so you'll understand, but for now all you need is your pen and paper, something to write with, okay? What we're going to explore in today's lesson, we're going to look at how materials are modified by the stages, for our time.

We're going to have the practical where we're going to make our own dye, and we're going to also take a look at some properties as well.

The keywords for today's lesson, modifying.

So that's when we're going to develop or make our changes to something.

And today's lesson should be item of clothing.

Textiles, well we spoke about this before where it's that textiles or any cloth that's made from interlacing fibres, that is woven or knitted.

So is it like my T-shirts is knitted even though you don't think of knitted when you see this spot.

It's a knit T-shirt.

Physical properties.

So when we're looking at the materials their physical property will be the trait of the material that is you to see, or I can feel or describe.

And the working property.

That's how the material behaves when it's been processed or manipulated to do a certain thing.

So make a note of these keywords and then we're going to move on.

So the first thing we're going to explore is natural dye.

Now, from the beginning of time, you know way back when, we've always used colour in human life whether it's for art or just to brighten up our days, make up, clothing.

We like to use colour and brighten up the world that we're living in.

You know, otherwise it could be a very dull, boring place.

Imagine living in a world with no colour, hmm.

Anyway, what you probably didn't know is that throughout the course of history and the rise of civilizations, colour has been used actually as a form of communication to explain to people your rank or your role, or who you've got an allegiance with, or an alliance with even, or which tribe you belong to or in some cases even your gender role, you know? So yeah.

Colour is more important than you probably realise.

New knowledge.

So now I just want to ask you a quick true or false question.

So natural dyes were used in the Neolithic period.

Now, it's a bit of history lesson, the Neolithic period that is the Stone Ages, end of the Stone Ages, around that period of time.

So true or false, natural dyes was was used in that period of time.

Yeah, if you said true, you're absolutely right.

So 12,000 years ago, they use natural dyes.

Now I want you to pause the video quickly and just have a discussion or write down some ideas where you think natural dye used to come from, hmm.

So you could have suggested any of the following areas you know, could have looked at plants, trees, berries, wildlife, or other, insects, okay.

Now all of these things are going to give us slightly different colours.

So plants, I mean, there's over 80 different colours we could have got from plants or, who'd'a thought that? You know, trees, we could think about the barks, we're going to get greys and browns and blacks, even.

Berries, you know we can get purples, magentas, blues, reds, all sorts of different violets, indigos, all those kinds of things.

And then insects, tend to get shades of red from our insects but it's from the shell.

Okay, so the crushed shell is what tends to give us the red, not their blood inside.

That's a bit gross.

So as you can see, there are loads of different things that we can use as natural dye in this world.

You know from bugs to barks to berries.

Alliteration there, bugs barks berries.

Bit of English.

Anyway, I want you to do a little task for me now.

I want you to think about the food that you've got in your house that you believe you could probably use as a natural dye.

Okay, so what I'd like you to do is draw out this table that I've got here, list at least 10 food items. You know, you could go more, you might write 8, you might write 12, see what you can do.

And think about what colour you would get from them.

So if I was to do spinach, I'd be like, I'm going to get green.

Or if you use turmeric powder, you got to get a nice yellow or goldy kind of colour.

So think about the rest of them.

You got cabbage, avocado, so on and so forth.

So write your list down, pause the video, write your list, and I'll get back to you shortly.

Welcome back, you may have mentioned any of these items. You know, berries.

So you could have named blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, and it's kind of obvious for us to kind of guess what colour we're going to get from those, you know, probably some reds, some purples, violets, indigos, those kind of shades.

And also if you use black beans, black beans also give you a nice indigo colour as well.

Coffee seeds, coffee beans.

You've going to get a nice brown from that dark browns, light browns, depending on how concentrated they are.

You know, you could've named a bunch of different vegetables that you could use from greens, loads of different things are going to give us shades of greens.

Or oranges, you know, oranges, gingers, going to get our orange from, did I say oranges? I meant carrots, sorry, carrots so that it goes orange.

And yeah, and also you know, you could think about an avocado.

I love an avocado.

Now, what colour do you think an avocado's going to give you? I'm not going to tell you.

No, no, no.

But what is with all these things, because they're natural dye, whatever you do and I do, they're still going to vary because the concentration is going to be different or the size is going to be slightly different.

So although the colour might be similar, to get it the same is going to be difficult.

You know, it's all about experimenting at the end of the day and that is what we're going to do in our practical right now.

So now I'm going to show you a video that demonstrates the practical activity.

It's fun, yeah, I promise you it's fun.

I have been doing it.

And my outcome, I was pretty chuffed, I think it was quite amazing to be honest, if I do say so myself.

But I must tell you this.

Number one, it comes with a warning.

Okay, it gets very messy, and you have to use a lot of hot water and cooking equipment.

So please make sure you have adult permission and adult supervision before you do anything.

Okay, make sure.

Number two, it takes a long period of time.

So this video's going to be condensed to about five minutes or so.

Realistically, you're going to need at least hour and a half maybe, hour and a half, two hours on a bad day.

It takes a long period of time.

So if you are going to do it, make sure you set apart that time so you can do it properly and effectively and have a fun experience.

So while you're watching the video, please make notes and enjoy.

So with this practical, there was a lot of preparation that I had to do firsthand.

So I had to cut down all my vegetables, and I used white onion, I used the peeling.

I used the fresh beetroots.

I used red cabbage, and I also used turmeric, or sorry, I always say turmeric wrong.

Now you might notice that I'm wearing gloves as well, that's because the foods that I've chose to use are very dyeie, I don't know if that's a word, but yeah, I used gloves and it was probably for the best.

Now while this was all being chopped down, I had my water boiling.

We'll be prepared for the next stage.

Now you can see my water is hot, but it doesn't have to be bubbling over like crazy, just a nice moderate temperature.

Now I use about three cups of water in each pot, three to four cups of water.

And you just pop your vegetables in.

Now, when you do cut them down, you want them to have a good surface area.

So there's enough flesh there to boil, essentially, rather than it just being mashed down.

Now, as you can see this part's going to take about 30 minutes or so at least, probably even an hour, You're going to boil it down, and eventually what you will get is the rich colours taken from the vegetables into the water.

You know, if you look at this orange here, I could have added a bit more water.

But there's a rich, really rich orange, it's not a brown, it's orange.

Now, ideally you want the water to cool down before you decant it, but I'm doing it now because I'm short on time.

And what you want to do is use a strainer to make sure you're keeping back all the flesh or the vegetables, and you can separate it.

You could actually use that in a composter, to be fair.

And then what you're going to do is have all your dyes separate, let them cool down, and then you can come back to them.

It's important to keep your kitchen clean along this process as well, because it can get very, very messy at this point.

Now I said to you earlier, that you dyes might be really different colours and it's literally all about experimentation.

You could do exactly the same vegetables as me, and get slightly different results.

You could also try mixing the colours like the blue and the red, and seeing what you get.

Now here's a little bit of a science trick for you.

If you take the blue, and you mix it with some baking soda, baking soda, I got baking soda, there we go, there's my baking soda.

And just stir that in, like so.

Glook, glook, glook, glook.

What happens is the blue turns into a lovely green.

Ta-da.

Now I can't explain the science behind that because I don't really know why it does it.

I know it's a chemical reaction of some sort, but I couldn't give you all the right words.

Probably something for you to research, and you could probably experiment and try that with other colours as well.

Now for the tie-dyeing parts where I've modified my T-shirt.

First thing you need to do is make sure you prepare your area.

So whether that's plastic, or newspapers, or if you've got a basin or a tray, that could even be better.

So you want to fold your material into whatever technique it is that you want to use.

You can copy my fold technique there.

And then I just put on three elastic bands around it and make equal parts.

And in each one of those sections that is where I'm going to apply the dye.

Now if you look online, there's several different techniques and you could try any one of them that you like.

This is the one I went for.

So you see me there applying my orange, my red.

Ba-doop.

Bit of the blue, get it on there.

Messy, so you see why you need to prepare your area? There's the lovely, what color's that one? Ah, that's my orange.

Oh, that's my red, orange and gold, there we go.

See the difference.

So you do that on the front.

You're going to to do it on the back as well.

Quite Blue Peter-ish, here's one I made earlier.

And once you've done all of that and you're happy with it, just going to remove the elastic bands, and what do we have? Ta-da, fantastic, yep, it worked.

So that is my modified natural dye tie-dye T-shirt.

Made with beetroots, cabbage, and other stuff.

Wicked.

So that's it guys, you've seen me do it, now it's over to you.

What you're going to do now is find a garment in your house and you're going to create your own dye, and you're going to modify your item, there you go.

Now make sure, I can't stress it enough, make sure you please have adult permission to use that garment.

Make sure you have adult permission to make the dye, make sure you have adult supervision when you're using this equipment.

So you should have your notes already.

So what I'd like you to do now, pause the video, get your equipment and everything all together, and then make your tie-dye.

Or research the internet and you can find how to dip-dye, or there's actually quite a few dyeing methods that you can try.

So yeah.

Have fun.

Stay safe, stay clean.

I'll see you when you get back.

Welcome back, you've been gone for a very long time.

So I'm anticipating to see fantastic outcomes from your creating your own natural dye and dyeing, or tie-dyeing, or dip-dyeing whichever dyeing method you used, I'm looking forward to seeing your items. Yeah, I'm quite excited.

But now we're going to look at the properties of materials.

Now remember in the keywords earlier on in the lesson, at the beginning, we looked at what property of materials are.

So we looked up and looked at physical and working properties of materials.

Now thinking about your last practical where you tie-dyed or dyed some material, if you dyed two or three different fabrics you might've seen that they absorbed the colour differently, or presented the colour differently, et cetera, et cetera.

And that will be because of the characteristics or the properties of different materials.

So if we was going to design a product, or even now we're going to design a product, our job as the designer, we'd be responsible to make sure we know the properties and the characteristics of the material or the fabric to make sure it's appropriate for what we need it to do.

So if I pick a material and it's no good for dyeing, but I want to dye it, that would be pretty stupid, right? So that's why it's important to understand properties and characteristics of materials.

Got it? Excellent.

So for your last task, it's a bit of like almost like a homework, you know, go away, do a bit of research, create a resource kind of thing.

Now I'm giving you five materials there.

Polyester, silk, satin, wool, and cotton.

All quite easy to attain, easy to get information about, I've double-checked already.

Right, and what I want you to do is create a resource based upon the properties of these materials.

So identifying or highlighting their properties, and then also explaining why, what you would use this material for.

So some keywords or properties that you may or may not know.

You know, is the material renewable or non-renewable? Can it be printed on? Is it thin or is it thick? Does it wash well? That's important, you know, that is very important.

Is it a shiny material? Is it coarse, it is soft? You know, is it synthetic? Is it natural? Is it cheap, is it expensive, et cetera, et cetera.

These are the kinds of things we want you to look at and think about the properties of these materials.

Could use this table as a guide for what you need to complete.

So I've separated it into natural and synthetic fibres already, and we just want to look at the physical properties, the working properties, and the items that we use it for.

So for example, if you wanted to look at the properties of wool, for example, its physical properties could be that the spun fleece from an animal, yada yada yada.

The working properties where I'll be talking about it being thick or soft, it's warm, hyperallergenic.

And men's items for use I could talk about having wool clothing or a wool hat a or wool scarf, or even some wool carpets.

Okay, make sense? I hope so.

So complete this task, and I will see you shortly.

So now we've reached the end of another lesson, so well done guys.

I tried to be fair and keep the theory to a minimum today because the practical was so vast, you know, big practical.

But I hope you enjoyed it, I really do.

Now whether you made one jar of natural dye or you made four, whether you modified one item or 10, doesn't matter.

The fact that you each had a try, I'm more than happy, more than impressed.

I would really like to see though is you share your outcomes from today's lesson.

So your dye and your modification of a item.

I'd love to see that shared on the Twitter.

But obviously, you know you've got to ask a parent or a legal guardian or someone responsible to do that for you.

Make sure you're tagging us @OakNational on the Twitter and with the hashtag LWO Learning with Oak.

I'll be there to see your work.

I might even give you a little like, okay.

So take care.

Make sure you clean up the mess and I'll see you soon.