[0:00]Textiles. What are they? And where do they come from? So what is a textile? Textiles are usually fabrics, so cloth, but they are always made of fibers and this is what fibers look like. What is a fiber then? A fiber is long and thin like a strand of hair. We could say one of your hairs is a fiber. Most fibers are a lot finer than your hair and it's sometimes hard to see one by itself. It looks like a piece of fluff. So what objects are textiles? Well, your clothing, sportswear, all your bedding, like pillowcases and sheets. And almost anything in your house that is soft will be a textile. So cushions, rugs, slippers. This is because fibers are flexible, so when you touch them, they bend around you, rather than staying in a fixed position like a hard object like a wooden table. And it wouldn't be very comfortable to sleep on top of a wooden table, that's where we prefer a mattress covered with a sheet. Some textiles can be rough and scratchy, so we wouldn't use them for clothes. Like the fiber coil, which is from coconut husks, is really hard and wiry, so we use it for doormats. These textiles pop up everywhere in your daily life, and there are some items you might not typically think of as being textiles. Like cotton wool, most of your shoes, the wipes that you use for makeup removing or cleaning. A tea bag is a textile, a rope is a textile, and even synthetic hair extensions are textiles because they're made of plastic fibers. Textiles are used in many professions to do special jobs. For example, medical textiles are used for protective equipment and for tubes, bandages. Lots of other things, even some that have electronics embedded in them. As you can see on the bottom right, that might measure your heart rate.
[2:03]There are many different textiles in cars, in airbags, seatbelts, upholstery, even in the tires, and behind the panels or the ceiling where you can't see them. Textiles are used in airplanes and spacecraft. Here you can see on the top left, a special 4D printed textile developed for space. That weird-looking thing on the right are airbags for the Mars Pathfinder and spacecraft. On the bottom right, some parachutes for shuttle landing and some astronaut clothing designed for the company SpaceX by Under Armor, who you might have come across making sportswear. So space travel for normal people will probably be commonplace within our lifetime and there'll be lots of textiles that we need for that. So I said that textiles are made of fibers, so let's learn more about fibers. Where do these fibers come from? So if you think fibers look like fluff quite a lot, where could we get fluff from? We collect these fluffy fibers from plants, sometimes the flower might be fluffy in the case of the cotton plant, or you might use the fibers from the stalks of the plant. If you think about when you eat celery, all those fibers that get stuck in your teeth, other plants are like that and we can collect those fibers. From animals, we would usually use the hair or the wool of the animal. So sheep wool is one type, but you can also get it from Angora rabbits, from alpacas, from llamas, camels, and you can make it from human hair if you really wanted to. We can also make fibers using chemicals that we get from crude oil, so the same thing that we make petrol or gasoline out of. We can react those chemicals together to form little chains of plastic, and these are called fibers as well. A final small category that I've put the bottom there, that is useful but not as interesting perhaps. We can use rocks to make fibers, things like asbestos, now you shouldn't be using asbestos anymore, but there are others out there. So more properly, we categorize textile fibers depending on where they come from. So these are the main types of fibers, you have natural, which is made of the plants and animals, they're natural. The synthetic one, so the petrochemicals, they are man-made. Then you have a third category which is called regenerated where we use things from natural sources but in a synthetic way. It's a bit like a cross between the two, we call that regenerated. People usually talk about fabrics or clothes depending on the fiber that is used. So we might say, "This dress is 100% cotton." Or that carpet is mostly wool. We're interested in what the fiber is that is used to make the product because every fiber has different properties. They also have different costs, so you can kind of see how much that product should cost depending on which fiber has been used. So if you want to look for in your clothes, what fibers have been used, have a look at these care labels. So you'll find that somewhere inside of your clothes and they will tell you, and they have to by law, tell you what the fiber composition is. So it will tell you, for example, "This T-shirt is 65% cotton and 35% polyester." These are some of the names of actual fibers, and you should have come across quite a few of these. So the natural fibers, we have got cotton, linen, and some other plant-based ones like jute, hemp, bamboo that you might have seen in socks, and there's many others. In the yellow box, uh, the animal-based fibers, so wool, silk, that's an expensive fiber, and other animal hair, like alpaca, or angora rabbit. For synthetic fibers, we have polyester, which is used in clothing a lot because it's cheap. Nylon, not as comfortable as polyester, but it's really tough. Elastane, which you would know as Lycra, the brand name, that's used in swimming costumes, in skinny jeans, in leggings. Basically, in anything that needs to stretch to get your body into it and then stretch back so it looks skin tight, you'll find that there is Elastane in there. Acrylic, which is kind of a fake wool, it's quite warm, and Kevlar, which is really strong and we use that in body armor, bulletproof vests. In the third category regenerated, the one that you would probably have to know is viscose, also known as rayon, in the USA. And viscose is made from wood chips that are dissolved, basically. You'll find that in tops and dresses and they they hang really nicely, but they also pill really easily, so that means that they get those annoying little bubbles on them. How do we convert these fibers into something useful? So fibers by themselves are not strong enough to make a product. So what we want to do is combine many fibers together to make them stronger. They're also quite short, so we want to make them longer. And we do that by spinning them into yarns. And spinning is the technical name for twisting. Yarns are much thicker than fibers, but they're still usually quite fine for making clothes. So examples of yarns that you might have seen are string, sewing thread is a yarn. If you like knitting or know someone that knits, you would have seen balls of wool that they use, they're called yarns. Yarns are long like string. So how are we going to make that into something that is useful? You know, like I don't want to wrap yarn around myself as clothes. So what we do is we will combine those yarns by weaving or knitting or bonding them into a fabric. And the fabric is flat and that's a lot more useful for making products. There are lots of other ways of making fabrics. Some of them you wouldn't really need to know about unless you wanted to go into that industry. Like carpet making. Some fabrics are really cheap, so they're not knitted or woven. They could be like glued together or bonded or needled punched to stick the fibers together. So if you think about masks that you would wear to protect yourself from getting sick, those types of masks are made from a very cheap fabric that will tend to be needled punched or another one of those methods. That kind of just sandwiches all of the fibers together. And if you've ever used felt at school, that's another fabric that's not woven or knitted. It's basically kind of tangled together. It's quite easy to pull out the individual fibers. Okay, so we've got a fabric and you are now ready to make a product with that fabric. So we're going to stop there for today. Let's recap what have we learned. The definition of textiles are that they are made of fibers. There are many textiles in our lives and some you can't even see. Textiles are usually soft and flexible, that's why they're useful to us. Fibers are categorized into two main categories, these are synthetic and natural. A third category is regenerated. It's important to know what fiber a textile is made of because different fibers have different properties and costs. Fibers are then spun into yarns and yarns are usually combined by weaving or knitting to make a fabric. And that's it for today.
