ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

Have you ever made your own cloth before? We did last year!

We made our own cloth out of cotton balls. Usually when you start making cloth with cotton or wool, the first thing you have to do is wash it so it will be clean. Our cotton balls were already clean, so we didn't have to do that step.

So for our first step we carded the cotton, which means using a spiked card to make all the strands go the same way. Since our cotton balls were pretty small, we used doll hairbrushes to card our wool!

Then it was time to spin the cotton into yarn. It was difficult to do it correctly! I had to look up a Youtube video to figure out how to do it.

Our yarn was made! It was a little lumpy! But it wasn't too bad for our first try :)



Next we had to dye the yarn. You can use synthetic dye, or you can use something natural like berry juice. We ended up using food coloring to dye our yarn. We had to boil the yarn in the dye and some vinegar to get the dye to stick.



Even though the dye was such a dark red, it didn't all stick to the yarn, so the yarn turned out a lovely shade of pink. After the yarn was dyed, we had to let it dry.



Once the yarn was dry, it was time to weave it! We made a very basic loom out of cardboard and yarn, and used a small piece of cardboard for the shuttle. The shuttle is what you use to get the yarn over and under the strings of the loom.



When we had used up all of our yarn, we cut off the loom strings and tied them together. Our cloth was completed! It didn't make a very large piece of cloth, but it was still fun to make!