Lesson video

Welcome to Art, Craft, and Design lesson.

This is the first of five lessons, where we'll be looking at textiles.

I'm Mrs. Creane, and I'm a teacher and an artist, and I'm going to be teaching you.

I like using a whole range of different media.

I like printing, drawing, painting, but I have to admit that textiles is probably my favourite.

It's the form of art and craft I do the most.

I use it to explore colour and pattern, and I also do it 'cause it makes me feel good.

If I'm feeling a little bit stressed or upset, it's the thing that I do to make myself feel better.

And I hope that by doing these lessons, you might be able to have that same experience.

And if you're feeling a bit sad or miserable, you might be able to sit and do some textiles to distract yourself and make yourself feel better.

This is something I'm working on at the moment.

As you can see, it's absolutely full of blue, it's all different stripes.

I love the colour blue, I'm a little bit obsessed, and anybody who knows me will tell you that that's true.

If you look carefully through the next lessons, you might be able to spot some of my work.

If you look and you find something that is very blue and very full of patterns, it's probably mine, keep your eye out.

I'm really excited to be leading these lessons.

Textiles is all around you.

It's a really, really ancient craft form, and it is thousands and thousands of years old.

And you probably know more about it than you think you do.

It's really rich, it's diverse, it's full of colour, and I really love it.

Anyway, should we get started? So this is the equipment you're going to need for this lesson.

You're going to need a sketchbook.

That might be a book, or it might just be some sheets of paper.

You're going to need a pencil or something to draw with.

You're going to need some scissors.

Now, as we're using scissors, you do need some adult supervision, so make sure your parent or your carer knows you're using scissors and is keeping an eye on what you're doing.

You're going to need some colouring materials.

That might be felted pens, it might be colouring pencils, something that you can add colour to your work with.

And you're going to need something a little bit strange.

You're going to need some old fabric, such as an old sock.

And if you look at that picture, that is my favourite sock.

It has now got a great big hole in the toe, so I was going to put it in the bin.

Now as it's got a hole in it, I'm quite happy to cut it up.

You need to see if you can find something that is old that you don't need anymore, something that you would have been putting in the bin.

It doesn't matter if it's a bit stained or if it's got a hole in it.

That's absolutely fine.

You need to check with your parent or carer first before you start taking things to cut up.

Now if you think you can't find something like that, that's absolutely fine.

You can do it with me, and you can share my old sock.

So today we're going to investigate what textiles are, we're going to look at how we use textiles in our homes, we're going to deconstruct some fabric, and I'll explain what deconstruct means in just a moment, and we're going to examine embellishment and decoration.

And these are our keywords.

We're going to have textile, which is a type of cloth or woven fabric; deconstruction, which means to take something apart, and we're going to do some deconstruction a little bit later on.

Fibres, fibres are the threads from which a textile is made, and again, by the end of this lesson, hopefully you'll understand what a fibre is really, really well.

And material, cloth, or fabric is something made from interlocking yarns or thread.

Now the words material, cloth, and fabric all mean the same thing, and they're interchangeable.

And quite often when people are talking about textiles, they'll use one or the other, but they all do mean the same thing.

Before we do anything else, I want you to have a little think.

What's your favourite thing to wear? What's the thing that you put on and makes you feel like this guy in the picture, leaping up and down in happiness? What is the thing that you put on to make yourself feel better? What's the thing that you wear that makes you smile? Have a little think, and we're going to use that in your drawing warmup.

So if you've got your favourite thing that you like wearing to hand, you might want to go and get it.

But if you haven't, that's absolutely no problem.

You can shut your eyes and just imagine what it looks like.

And as it is your favourite thing, I'm sure you know what it looks like really, really well.

This is my favourite top.

It's really old.

You know that cardigan is over 20 years old, and it's my favourite, because I've had it, not just because I've had it for so long, but because I just have so many happy memories of wearing it.

I wore that for my graduation.

I've worn it to some of my friends' weddings, and every single time I put it on, it makes me feel happy, it makes me smile.

And if I'm feeling a little bit miserable or a little bit grey, I'll quite often choose to wear it, because it reminds me of so many happy things.

If you look carefully, you can see I've lost a button.

I need to fix that.

So what you're going to do is you're going to do a quick sketch of your favourite thing to wear.

We're going to do a drawing of it and put it in our sketchbooks, because this is our beginning of us understanding what textiles are.

I want you to record what it looks like and any decorations it's got on it, and I would like you to add a sentence to say why you like it.

Pause the video now, and start it again when you've finished.

Can't wait to see what your pictures look like.

This is what I drew, this is my cardigan.

There's the photograph on one side, and there's my drawing on the other.

Now I had to fold the arms up in my picture; otherwise they'd have hung off the end.

And I've added some notes to explain what my cardigan is like, just in case I forget.

I've put silver threads.

I've said that it's got a ribbed bottom, it's got shiny grey buttons, and it's soft, pale, smooth, knitted, and it's got sewing or embroidery on it.

Oh, I love your picture, too.

So what are textiles? Well, textiles are different types of cloth or woven fabric, and here's a picture of some.

There's a great big pile here, isn't there, of all different types of textiles.

And look carefully, you can see there's stripes and all sorts of different patterns and different colours.

Sometimes when people are talking about textiles, they use the word material.

But they can also use the terms cloth or fabric.

And when we're talking about textiles, we mean things that are made of cloth, fabric, or material.

I wonder which word your family tends to use.

Do you use cloth, do you use fabric, do you use material? When you're talking about what your clothes are made of, do you say, "Ooh, my clothes are made of material," "My clothes are made of cloth," "My clothes are made of fabric." Any is fine, doesn't matter.

I just want you to understand that you can use any one of those three words to talk about textiles.

So it's the use of colour and pattern that makes textiles interesting.

It's the way that we use the colour and the pattern that makes these pictures interesting, isn't it? If you look at them, they're all very, very different.

There's yellows and blues and pinks, and look at all the different patterns that have been used.

And look, you can't just make patterns.

You can also make pictures.

There's a picture of a deer there, too, isn't there? I wonder if you can spot which one of those is mine.

Do you remember at the beginning of the video I said that I like to make things made of, that are patterned in blue? I suspect you've spotted it already, haven't you? It's the blue cushion in the middle with the blue squares.

I made that, and it took me a very long time.

I have to say it took me months and months of sitting each evening and doing a little bit of sewing to make that.

I was quite pleased with it, and now it sits on my sofa.

And that's one of the things that makes textiles interesting, isn't it? It's the way they're all different.

If you compare the way your house is decorated to somebody else that you know, or your school is decorated, it's quite often the textiles that we use that make the differences, that make it interesting, that add the colour.

Think about how different they are.

What I want you to do now is to go on a textiles hunt.

Now remember, textiles are things made of cloth, fabric, or material.

Things that are made of cloth, fabric, or material is what you're looking for.

You're going to use your sketchbook, and you're going to follow these instructions.

The first thing you need to do is to split your page into six boxes, just like I have in that picture there.

Can you see, I split it down the middle and then put two lines across, six boxes, roughly the same size.

I didn't use a ruler, so it doesn't matter if they're not quite straight, just split the page up.

And then what I want you to do is to draw one textile, one thing made of cloth, fabric, or material in each box.

I want you to have a look around, wherever you are, and see if you can find six different examples of textiles, six different things that are made of cloth or fabric or material.

Once you've found them, I want you to draw one thing per box, one in each box.

I want you to see if you can say what it is, and then you might want to make some notes.

Try and draw any patterns or shapes that you find on it.

You might even want to make notes about the colour it is.

So what you're going to do now is you're going to do your sketchbook activity.

You're going to draw a picture, just like that, split your page into six.

You're going to find six examples of textiles, that's things that are made of cloth, fabric, or material.

You might want to add notes to record what it felt like, what it was used for, and how it was decorated.

Pause the video now, and see if you can find six examples, draw them, can't wait to see what you find.

And when you've done all of that, start the video again, and I'll be waiting to see what you did.

Wow, you did find a lot.

This is what I found.

I went round my house and looked really, really carefully.

I wanted to find six things that were quite different that were made of textiles, that were made of fabric, cloth, or material.

I found some cushions in my sitting room, all different cushions, if you look there carefully.

Look at how different the patterns are, and yep, you've spotted it, there's my cushion again.

I found some clothes, and if you look at the drawing, I've written the words smooth and silky, just to remind myself that all the clothes felt different.

The textiles, the fabric that they were made from was quite different.

I found some carpet on my stairs, and carpet is made of textiles.

I found a blind.

I found a box of toys made out of fabric.

And there you can see a bunny.

He looks like he's just about to jump out of the box and go and have a game somewhere, doesn't he? Now if you look at my drawing, I tried to get the idea that it was a patterned basket that the textiles, the toys were sitting in, but I just drew little stars, because the pattern sort of got too complicated for me to be able to draw.

And you might just have done that.

You might've just given a hint in your drawing of what the real thing looked like.

And I found some blankets as well.

So let's think for a minute.

Textiles are used all the time in everyday life.

Have we found that to be true or false? Do we sue cloth, fabric, and material all the time? True, false, what do you think? Yes, it's true, isn't it? We do, you do use textiles all the time.

We use them for making clothes to keep us warm.

We use them to decorate our houses.

We use them to keep our houses warm.

Carpet and curtains do that, don't they? If you think about cars, they have fabric on the seats quite often, don't they? If we think about at school, there are blinds on the windows to stop the light coming through.

We use textiles all the time in all sorts of different ways.

Now what we're going to do next is see if we can deconstruct some fabric.

Can you remember what the word deconstruct means? Deconstruct means we're going to take apart some fabric.

Because what I want you to do is to understand that not all textiles are the same.

They're made in different ways.

So by deconstructing, by taking it apart, we can begin to look at how textiles are made.

You might want to pause the video as we work through this next bit.

You might want to be able to do it with me.

And if you do want to do it with me, you need to have your piece of textiles ready.

Do you remember at the beginning I said you might want something that you don't want anymore, like an old sock? Well, if you have got that, now is when you need it.

If you know what you want and you haven't got it with you, go and get it now.

But don't panic, there it is, there's my old sock, that's what I'm going to be using.

If you don't have anything that you can use, don't panic, you can do it with me.

I've got some fabric, and you can watch what I did.

Off you go, see if you can find something if you can.

And if you haven't, don't panic, keep watching.

So we're now going to deconstruct some fabric.

What I want you to do, when we finish this, make sure that you add it to your sketchbook, because it'll be something useful for you to be able to look back on.

You might want to glue it straight in, or you might want to find an old envelope, glue the envelope into your book, and stick this, tuck the textiles inside it.

It's up to you, do that in a minute, let's get on with the deconstruction first, though.

So the first thing we're going to do is to cut a small square of the fabric.

Now we are using scissors, so make sure that you mind your fingers, and make sure that your parent or carer is keeping an eye on what you're doing.

Cut it into a small square.

The next thing you need to do is to see if you can pull at the edges.

And you can see there, I'm trying very hard to pull the edges of the fabric, see if I can pull it apart, see if I can deconstruct it, and that's what it ended up like, can you see? There's lots of sort of twists of fabric.

Now those twists are called, each little bit, each little strand is called a thread.

And if you look, the threads there have become all curly, haven't they, all twisted.

And there are lots and lots and lots of them.

I wonder when you do your fabric, does your fabric look the same as mine? Now it may not.

It may look like this piece of fabric we're about to look at now.

So let's see.

This fabric is different.

It started off like this, and if you look carefully, you can see that this is a piece of woven fabric.

And if we pull it apart, gently pulling at the edges, it came apart completely differently, can you see? So let's see if we can compare those two pieces of fabric.

The piece at the top is the piece of fabric I found, and the picture at the bottom is a piece of my sock.

And if you look really, really carefully, they came apart completely differently, didn't they? The sock came away in sort of long spirals, and the piece of fabric at the top came away in long, straight strands, and they look quite different, don't they? The top almost looks like it's got a fringe, and the other one looks like it's got a mad hairstyle.

Now they've come apart quite differently because they're constructed differently, they're made in very different ways.

And that's because not all fabric is made in the same way.

Some things are made differently to other things, and that is really important, because the way things are made alters the way that we might want to use them.

The piece of fabric at the top is woven.

It's made out of long strands, long threads of fabric, and you can see the thread in the picture there, can't you, along the bottom, that are sort of woven together in straight lines, whereas the sock is knitted, and knitted fabric is made by sort of twisting the fabric together.

But you might have had a piece of fabric that didn't look like either of those, that was a bit more like this, and was really, really hard to pull apart.

I have to say I really struggled even to pull this rectangle this much.

It was really hard.

And if you look really, really carefully, you can see that it sort of looks like a piece of fluffy fabric.

Now this piece of fabric is called felt, and we use felt all the time, quite often in school we use felt.

Felt is made completely differently to the other two pieces of fabric that we look like.

Felt is made by pressing those fluffy fibres together, and you can see the fluffiness.

And what they do is they sort of press them and twist them, sort of mat them and grind them together so they stick together, and then press them really hard and make a piece of fabric.

Now felt could be really, really useful.

It's useful because it's really, really hard to pull apart and it doesn't fray.

And later on in one of our lessons, I'm going to use some felt to make something with precisely for that reason, because it doesn't fray and pull apart easily.

What we're going to do next is to take one thread or one of the yarns.

I'm going to be using a piece that I found from around the house.

You could use the piece that you've just pulled off your fabric if you had some.

Remember, if you couldn't do it because you had a piece of felt or you didn't have any fabric, that's fine.

You can keep watching the video and I'll explain.

So this is the yarn, the thread that I found, the one strand, that's called a thread or a yarn.

People use it exactly the same, same thing, different words.

And what we're going to do is we're going to untwist it, so sort of pull it, and see if you can take the twist out of it.

Can you see, I've managed to pull it apart there.

And it made me realise that the yarn, which looked like it was one thing, was actually lots and lots and lots of things, lots of threads, lots of sort of fibres that have been twisted together.

Now each of those fibres is then twisted together to make the thread, and the threads are then used to make textiles.

So fibres are often used to make textiles.

Sheep's wool is made out of fibres like that.

Lots and lots of textiles is made in this way.

So let's just have a little think.

Textiles are made in lots of different ways.

They're made by interlinking several strands together by weaving them, and there is a picture of somebody making some fabric by weaving them.

But they might be made by creating loops of yarn that interlock, which is called knitting, and these are knitted together.

Or they might be made by pressing and matting them together, which is how we make felt, and there is a great big pile of felt to look at.

So a key part of textiles is how they're embellished, or how they're decorated.

Sometimes we might print them, and there is somebody with a printing press adding ink to them, adding colour to it by pressing the ink on top of the base of the fabric.

Sometimes we embroider them, and we're going to look at embroidery in the next lesson.

Embroidery is when you use stitching, and you sort of add, you sew on top of it to add the colour and the decoration.

Or it might be applique, and again, we're going to look at applique in one of our other lessons, which is where you take separate pieces of fabric and sew them on top.

So if you look at that, it says home, and each of those letters is a different piece of fabric that have been cut out and then sewn on top of the base material, and that's what applique is.

Now what we're going to do next is look very carefully at a piece of textiles.

You might want to look at my piece of textiles, or you might have a piece of textiles that you've got that you'd rather look at of your own.

If you haven't got a piece you want to look at, look at mine.

If you've got your own, that's fine, you can do exactly the same thing with what you've got.

This is a piece of one of my pieces of sewing.

It's the edge of a cushion cover.

There's the big cushion.

It makes your eyes go funny, and the photograph looks quite blurry, doesn't it? I promise the photograph isn't blurry.

It's just because of the way the pattern works, it makes it go blurry.

And can you see how I've used stripes that go in different directions? What I would like you to do, that's it, see, it's from that corner there, I want you to make a careful drawing of whatever textiles you chose, if you haven't got your own, you can use mine, in your sketchbook.

See if you can record the patterns that it's got on it, the material, and the textures that you can see.

Make notes to remind yourself of what it looks like.

So pause the video there, make a careful drawing of the textiles that you can see.

You can use mine, or you can go and make a careful drawing of something of your own.

Pause the video and start it again when you've finished.

So much for joining me today.

I have to say, your drawings absolutely amazing, well done, good learning today.

Next time in our next lesson, we're going to see if we can make some textiles of our own.

We're going to have a go at doing some weaving.

If you'd like to share your work with Oak National, this is how you do it.

Ask your parent or carer first, and they can load your work onto Twitter, tagging at @OakNational or at #LearnwithOak.

I'd love to see what you've been doing.

Remember, ask your parent or carer first.

I'll see you next lesson, goodbye.