Class 5 Environmental Studies Chapter 8: Clothes — How Things are Made

A nest that swings

Ira waits under the neem tree with her grandmother. A grey-brown pouch hangs from a thin branch. It sways in the wind and does not fall. A small bird slips in through a hole below. "Who tied that up there?" Ira asks. Her grandmother laughs. "Nobody tied it. A bird made it, strand by strand."

The bird with busy feet

The nest belongs to a baya weaver. The male bird gathers long blades of grass. He pulls one blade above the next, then below the one after. He keeps going until the grass holds itself together. The finished pouch hangs from the branch and stays strong. Older males build neat nests. A bird in his first year makes a rough one.

What the bird is doing has a name

The bird is weaving. Weaving means taking thin strips or long threads over and under one another. They lock together and become one sheet. That sheet can be a nest, a mat, a basket or a piece of cloth. Nothing is glued. The crossing alone holds it.

Two directions

Look closely at any woven thing. One set of threads stands up and down. Another set runs from side to side. Each thread of the second set passes above one standing thread and below the next. That is the whole trick. Over, under, over, under.

Paper strips first

Ira tries it with paper. She tapes six blue strips down side by side. Then she slides a yellow strip across, above one blue strip and below the next. The second yellow strip goes the other way round. Slowly a small mat appears. Threads instead of paper would have given her cloth.

Woven things all around

People have woven for a very long time. They use whatever grows nearby. Coconut fibre, palm reeds, bamboo, grass and jute all bend without snapping. From them come mats, baskets and big sheets. Cotton and silk are much finer, so they become the cloth we wear.

The loom

Cloth is woven on a loom. A loom is a frame that holds the standing threads pulled tight. The weaver's hands send the other threads across, one after another. Weavers have worked this way in India for about four thousand years. Cloth made like this is called handloom cloth.

Cloths with famous names

Every region weaves in its own way. Kanjeevaram belongs to Tamil Nadu. Pashmina belongs to Kashmir. Ikat is woven in Odisha and in Gujarat. Each one has its own pattern and its own skill. A Patola saree from Patan can keep a weaver busy for half a year.

Cloth as light as air

Long ago our weavers made a cotton cloth so fine that a hand could hardly feel it. A whole saree would slip through a finger ring. India was also the first land to grow cotton and turn it into clothing.

Looms and mills

A mill is a different place. Its machines spin thread and weave cloth very fast, in huge quantities. A handloom is slower, and it runs on no electricity at all. Both give us cloth. Only one of them gives a family work at home.

Why weaving matters here

Weaving is not only about clothes. Around forty-five lakh people in India earn a living from it. Many of them are women in villages. Their designs have been handed down for generations. Buying handloom cloth keeps that skill and those designs alive.

Scenario:

A class weaves paper strips to make a mat. The rule is one over, one under. Ravi loses his place halfway and his mat develops a hole. His teacher asks the class to count the strips before starting again. With twenty strips the pattern repeats in a way the children can check: every strip should cross the one beside it the opposite way. Ravi finds his mistake by checking pairs rather than the whole mat. The class then looks at a baya weaver's hanging nest. The bird takes each blade over and under too, and it does not lose its place.

Analysis:

The hole came from losing the place, not from a wrong rule. Checking neighbouring strips in pairs finds the slip without unpicking the whole mat.

Activity:

Weave a paper mat with twelve strips using one over, one under. Check it in pairs and mark any mistake you find.

Title:

Your first woven mat

Safety:

Use blunt scissors, and ask an adult to help with the cutting.

What You Notice:

The strips hold each other without any glue. Pull gently at one corner and the mat stays whole. Pull one strip right out and a gap opens, which shows that every strip is doing a job.

A young weaverbird's first nest looks untidy. The older males build far neater ones.

One Patola saree from Patan in Gujarat can keep a weaver busy for a whole year.

How weaving goes — OVER, UNDER, OVER, UNDER — Say it aloud while your fingers move and the pattern comes out right.

Two directions of thread — Standing threads, running threads — One set stands up and down. The other runs across them, side to side.

Where does the thread come from?

Ira has woven her paper mat. Now she wants to weave cloth. She asks her grandmother for thread. Her grandmother hands her something else: a soft white lump of cotton. "But I asked for thread," says Ira. "Then make some," says her grandmother, smiling.

Pull, then twist

Ira tugs gently at the lump. A soft strand comes away. It breaks at once. Her grandmother shows her the missing step. Hold the strand and roll it between your fingers, always the same way. The strand tightens. Now it does not break so easily. Twisting has made it strong.

Winding it up

She winds the twisted strand round a pencil. Each time it runs short she pinches on a little more cotton and keeps rolling. The pencil fills up slowly. What is on the pencil is thread.

A word for the work

Twisting cotton into thread is called spinning, and the wheel that does it is a charkha. That wheel, does the same job as Ira's pencil and fingers. It only does it far faster and far more evenly.

The tiniest piece

Now untwist a bit of the thread. It opens into hair-thin pieces. Each of those is a fibre. Fibres are the beginning of everything. Twist fibres to get thread. Weave thread to get cloth. Cut and stitch cloth to get a shirt.

A wheel in our history

Gandhiji spun on a charkha every day, and asked the whole country to spin too. If Indians made their own cloth, they would not have to buy cloth from anyone else. Hand-spun, hand-woven cloth is called khadi. It became a sign of a free and self-reliant India.

Fibres that grow

Cotton is not our only fibre. Linen and bamboo come from plants as well. Wool is combed from the coats of sheep and goats. The Changthangi goat of cold Ladakh gives the soft wool for pashmina. All of these are called natural fibres.

The silk moth's gift

Silk comes from an insect. A silk moth's young one spins a cocoon of one very long thread around itself. The cocoons are dropped into hot water, which loosens the winding. Workers then draw the thread off and wind it up. Out of it comes silk cloth.

Round and round again

The silk moth's life turns in a circle. The moth lays eggs. Tiny caterpillars hatch out. They eat mulberry leaves and grow fat. Each one then spins a cocoon around itself. Later a moth comes out of the cocoon, and the eggs are laid again. This repeating pattern is called a life cycle.

Fibres people make

Some fibres do not grow anywhere. People make them in factories out of other materials. Nylon, rayon, polyester and terylene are all like this. We call them synthetic fibres. A raincoat, a sports jersey and a nylon rope are made of them.

Both kinds, every day

Look at what you are wearing. A cotton shirt and a woollen cap are natural. The zip tape, the school bag and many socks are synthetic. Most homes use both sorts. Natural fibres breathe well in our heat, while synthetic ones dry quickly and last long.

Scenario:

A class pulls apart a piece of cotton wool and tries to lift a pencil with a single fibre. It snaps at once. Nita twists many fibres together and tries again. The twisted thread holds. Their teacher asks the class to count how many fibres it took. They try with five, ten and twenty. Five breaks, ten holds a pencil, twenty holds a small book. The children see the pattern. One fibre is hair-thin and weak, and twisting is what turns many weak fibres into one strong thread. The class names the twisting, and notes that a charkha does it quickly.

Analysis:

One fibre snaps and twenty hold a book. Twisting does not change the fibre, it makes many of them act as one.

Activity:

Twist cotton wool into threads of five, ten and twenty fibres. Test what each will lift and record the results.

Title:

Spin your own thread

Safety:

Use cotton wool, not a sharp spindle. Keep the loose fibres away from your nose.

What You Notice:

An untwisted strand snaps as soon as you pull. The same strand twisted holds firm. When you untwist a piece at the end, hair-thin fibres open out on the dark paper. Those fibres are what the thread was made of.

One silk cocoon is spun from a single thread that can run longer than a school playground.

More jute is grown in India than in any other country on earth.

From cotton to shirt — FIBRE, THREAD, CLOTH, CLOTHES — Four words in order: twist fibres, weave thread, cut and stitch cloth.

Silk moth stages — Egg, eater, envelope, escape — Egg, the leaf-eating caterpillar, the cocoon it wraps, then the moth coming out.

The leaf that was a house

On the way home Ira stops. A big leaf on a bush has been rolled into a cone. Its two edges are held shut all along the join. Something soft is packed inside. "Is that a nest?" she asks. Her grandmother nods. "A little green bird made it. And it did not tie the leaf. It sewed it."

A bird that sews

The bird is a tailorbird. It pokes small holes down the edge of the leaf with its beak. Then it pulls plant fibre or spider silk through hole after hole. The two edges come together and stay. Inside this green sleeve it packs soft stuff, and there its eggs are safe.

What we do with a needle

People sew in the same way, with a needle and thread. We sew a button back on. We close a tear in a sleeve. A tailor joins flat pieces of cloth into a kurta. Weaving made the cloth; stitching turns cloth into things.

The simplest stitch

The running stitch is the first one to learn. Thread a needle and knot the far end. Bring the needle up through the cloth from below. Push it down again a little ahead. Bring it up once more, a little further on. Up, down, up, down, in a straight line. That is the whole stitch.

Joining two pieces

Lay one piece of cloth flat. Put a second piece on top so that their edges overlap. Now run your stitch along the overlap. The two pieces become one. Add another piece and then another, and a mat or a table cloth grows under your hands.

Every stitch has a job

Ira snips one stitch in the middle of her row. A small gap opens and the cloth there hangs loose. The stitches on either side still hold. But the join is weaker now. In a woven mat too, pulling out one strip leaves a hole. Each thread is doing part of the work.

Stitches that decorate

A stitch need not only join. It can draw. Across India people cover cloth with stitched flowers, birds, mirrors and lines. This decorating with a needle is called embroidery. Each style has its own colours, its own patterns and its own home town.

An embroidery map of India

Chikankari is stitched in Lucknow. Phulkari belongs to Punjab. Kantha is worked in West Bengal, Odisha and Tripura. Gota and Banjara work come from Rajasthan. Toda embroidery is from Tamil Nadu, Khneng from Meghalaya, and Kashmir has its own style too.

Tie first, then dye

Not every pattern is stitched. In Bandhani, tiny bits of the cloth are tied up tight with thread before it goes into the dye. The tied bits stay pale. Untie them and rows of dots and circles appear. Fingers and thread do all of it.

Nothing is thrown away

In most Indian homes clothes are hardly ever thrown out. A shirt that no longer fits goes to a younger cousin. A worn saree becomes a duster, a bag or a pillow cover. Using a thing again instead of buying new is one way of caring for our earth.

A quilt of small pieces

There is an old habit here of saving every scrap of cloth. The scraps are laid side by side and stitched together into a quilt. No two squares are alike. One may be from a school shirt and one from a festival kurta. The quilt keeps a family warm, and it keeps their memories too.

Scenario:

Meher's grandmother keeps a cloth bundle under her bed. Every scrap left over from a stitched dress goes into it. In the winter holidays the two of them empty the bundle on the floor. They pick out squares of the same size. These are laid out in six rows. Every row holds eight squares. Meher counts the rows twice to be sure. Some squares come from her old school shirts. One is from her uncle's wedding kurta. Two are from a torn saree. They join the squares with a running stitch, row by row. Then they sew the whole sheet on to an old bedcover. The work takes them four afternoons. The quilt is warm, and every square has a story.

Analysis:

Reusing cloth saves new cloth from being made, and a rows-and-columns quilt is also a real multiplication problem.

Activity:

Collect ten scraps of old cloth at home, cut them to the same size and lay them out in rows. Count how many squares you would need for a quilt as wide as your bed.

Title:

A running stitch on card

Safety:

Use a blunt plastic needle, never a sharp steel one, and ask an adult to be with you while you make the holes.

What You Notice:

On the front you see short dashes of wool with gaps between them. On the back the dashes fall exactly in the gaps. That is a running stitch. If you pull one dash out, the line is still held by the others, but it sags at that spot.

The tailorbird sews with spider silk when no plant fibre is handy.

In Bandhani work the dots are made with nothing but fingers and thread.

The running stitch — UP, DOWN, UP, DOWN — Say it as the needle moves and your line of stitches stays even.

Caring for old cloth — Pass it on, patch it up, piece it together — Three ways to use cloth again instead of throwing it out.