BioDesign: Designing thread from leaf

Feb 19

Feb 19 BioDesign: Designing thread from leaf

2/18

I have been practicing sewing for a while now. And it intrigues me to try the combination of a variety of fabrics and threads sewn together. The fashion industry produces 10% of all humanity's carbon emissions, is the second-largest consumer of the world's water supply, and pollutes the oceans with microplastics. I thought this is a good point of me to get started with working on creating an environmental friendly fashion resource.

The design of a leaf is extremely intricate and structural. I immediately drew the connection in the similarity between intricacy of a leaf and a thread that we use the sew the fabric with.

I soon came across this Italian startup company, Orange Fiber, who essentially design sustainable fabric from citrus juice by-products. They use the cellulose extract from orange peels through a patented process. This allowed me to explore a new start to the project.

Cellulose Extraction

I googled processes to extract leaf cellulose, which was pretty doable using household materials.

Step 1: Take a large beaker and add 100 mL of water to it.
Step 2: Add a source of cellulose to the beaker and begin stirring it with a large spoon until the liquid inside the beaker is a dark, deep green color.
Step 3: Place a coffee filter inside a strainer and place the strainer over a separate beaker.
Step 4: Filter off the solution from inside the first beaker to remove any grass particles. Doing so will extract the chlorophyll from the grass.
Step 5: Allow the grass mulch to completely dry. With the water and chlorophyll now extracted, cellulose is the only remaining component.

While this process seemed feasible, I was found myself to be lost for the next steps. I was not sure how to carry out the project further.

Hence, I started looking at the structure of the leaf and noticed the intricacy of the hems once again. It kept coming to me that maybe I could use the hems to design a thread that is more sustainable.

Leaf Hem

When thread is spun, may it be cotton, wool etc, it is spun with wax to make sure its structure is intact. On doing some research online, I noticed that the regular paraffin wax is not environmental friendly but the soy bean wax is biodegradable.

I am not trying to test the possibilities to try spinning the hem of a leaf with some of the soybean wax and explore what can come off this experiment.

2/25

I decided to take some leaves from a plant below my house to test the hem of the leaves.

I cut and sheared the hem of the leaves using an ulta knife. It was tricky to sharpen the hem of these leaves since they were really delicate and intricate. It took patience to get the hem in the right form.