Things Around Us
Clothes — how things are made
Follow cotton from fibre to thread to cloth, tell natural fibres from synthetic ones, put the silk moth's life cycle in order, and place India's handloom and embroidery traditions.
Before people wove anything, birds did. The male baya weaver builds a hanging nest out of grass, taking each strand over and under the last until the whole pouch is strong enough to swing from a branch. An expert bird's nest is fine and neat; a young one still learning makes a rough job of it. Weaving is exactly that: one set of threads laid vertically, another laid horizontally, crossed over and under until separate strands become one fabric.
Fibre, thread, cloth
Pull a strand from a ball of cotton and untwist it and you get a thin hair-like thread — that is a fibre. Twist fibres together and you have thread or yarn, and the twisting is called spinning; a charkha, or spinning wheel, does it. Weave the thread on a loom and you have cloth. Cloth woven by hand on a loom is handloom fabric; textile mills do the same two jobs by machine and in far larger quantities.
Natural and synthetic
Bamboo, cotton, linen, wool and silk are natural fibres — they come from plants and animals. Nylon, rayon, polyester and terylene are synthetic fibres, made by people out of artificial materials. Most of us wear both in the course of a week.
Khadi
Spinning your own thread from cotton and weaving it into fabric yourself makes khadi. Gandhi ji held it up as what being self-sufficient looks like in the hand, and it became a symbol of the freedom struggle and of the path to becoming atmanirbhar.
Worked example
Take a ball of cotton, pull out a strand, and twist it slowly between your fingers. Why does it get stronger as you twist?
First untwist a bit of the strand and look at what it is made of: thin hair-like threads lying alongside one another.
Each of those is a fibre, and a single fibre is short and weak — you can snap one without noticing.
Try it together
Work out how a cocoon on a mulberry tree becomes a silk saree.
A silk moth caterpillar wraps itself in a cocoon of one long thread. That thread is what we end up wearing.
1.The cocoons are collected and dropped into hot water. What does that let the workers do with each cocoon?
Have a go
Have a go on your own. A tiny green bird pokes holes along the edge of a big leaf and pulls plant fibre through them with its beak, sewing the leaf into a sleeve for its nest. What is this bird called?
Ready to practise?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.