How to Grow a $5,000 T-Shirt in Only 3 Years

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its raw color dye and print it myself how hard could that be step 1 growing the cotton the first challenge I faced and growing my t-shirt is that I don't live in an ideal climate the growing of cotton here in Minnesota which needs a nice long warm growing season most commonly like that in the southern US so to extend the limited growing season here so that we were able to start in the dead of winter in February I enlisted the help of a local hydroponics store Midwest supplies we weren't able to find a ton of information on how best to grow cotton indoors so I tried a few different methods of growing them some in soil some in a rock wool growing medium [Music] first I scratched up the other hole of the cotton seeds to help them sprout faster and then plant them and left them to grow for a few weeks [Music] then transferred them to larger pots where they would grow for the next three months [Music] [Music] then when the last frost had finally passed in me it was time to get them transferred outside into my community garden plot all right I'll load it up with my cotton let's see the garden but first only to clear the field [Music] at this stage I moved everything over to just soil and kept a few of them inside some large bags so they can potentially bring them back inside if an early frost came in [Music] a few weeks later I ran into the next issue when some heavy spring rainfall flooded the area threatening to drown my cotton so took some quick action to move the plants to less flooded area and built up some of the soil so they'd be drier well looking pretty rough they fortunately were able to pull through and keep going through the summer they continued to produce flowers which then turned into bowls and then opened up into cotton [Music] Steffie guy he's got a couple bowls better on them flowers it's pretty small to a ton of them and it's growing kind of sideways then a frost hit and the growing season was abruptly over in October a lot of the bowls hadn't even opened yet so my yield was a bit lower than what it should have been the lesson idea climate transitioning from being indoor to outdoor and then being nearly drowned all likely slowed its development [Music] fortunately some of the unopened balls did continue to develop and I was able to come back later and harvest a whole new batch step 2 turning the fibre into a t-shirt now with a crop of cotton collected the next step is turning it into a linear thread turning that thread into a 2d cloth and turn that 2d cloth into a 3d t-shirt but for this I'm gonna need some special tools because of Cotton's short threads a standard spinning wheel can be difficult to use to spin it generally need one that can spin the short fibers a little faster so I enlisted some help with building a simple electric spinning wheel this ran into its own issues of scheduling conflicts and miscommunications but eventually resulted in a completed wheel first I spent a good amount of time practicing on spinning wool which is an easier fiber to spin just to get the hang of the spinning wheel and to get better at making a consistent thin thread then moved on to the cotton which is a much bigger challenge with his shorter threads in a consistent and strong thread took a very long time to master and after realizing the huge time investment this was going to take to make all the thread I needed I realized I was going to add someone else to help split the labor so they'd be able to start weaving the fabric as I spin it enter Annelise initially to offer some advice on constructing a loom myself but as a project went on I ended up recruiting her more and more to help me complete this massive project the challenge with this article of clothing is we are aiming for a lightweight fabric made with a very thin yarn all produced with an even consistency and tight enough density that you can print onto it in a standard t-shirt this is done by knitting it which gives a shirt fabric it's stretchy characteristic but to try and achieve a t-shirt quality hand it would be pretty much impossible an incredibly time-consuming especially for someone like me who's only learned the basics of knitting this quality of knit fabric was only possible thanks to the invention of the knitting machine in 1589 but billions update that complex was out the window so I said Anna Lee out with the challenge of producing a basic loom the provide a fabric with a density thick enough to print on her initial design ran into some design flaws so after a struggle of spending a month to just produce a small strip of cloth she went back to the design board to make some improvements so this is the new and improved loom I've made some alterations to it because put the old loom this piece of fabric took a month and it's really all around very bad it's got a very loose weave a very uneven weave and then you can also see through it like cheesecloth it's not very good and it's definitely not printable I cut that off and made some alterations to the loom to hopefully make a better quality fabric that we could definitely make a t-shirt out of and definitely print on one of the first alterations I did was I had an D 3d print a ratchet and pawl system to function as the break so that this actually doesn't like move on me when I don't want it to next thing that we changed was I had this speeder bar ordered pull the reed that fits in the wooden frame to make it a beater bar and that packs the weft threads back much more densely and much more evenly so that you're getting a much better looking fabric I also had these petals order and then built this wooden shaft dreams forum there's about a thousand hetal's on here 250 per shaft so that's how many warp threads are through the fabric is roughly a thousand and then to lift the petal shafts I put in this lever plate frame this string goes back on either side down and then ties into the heddle shafts and so when we lower the lever it raises the heddle shaft to make the shed so you'd lift every other shaft and that would lift every other thread and then you drop those and then lift these to lift the other threads and that's pretty much all the improvements made what's your name her name is Florence cos Florence is the machine I love her dearly we were able to weave this fabric which is much nicer and much denser and all-around way better in about a week instead of this which took them up so now that we are at what I based on my math should be about 58 inches of fabric which is enough to make a t-shirt I'm going to cut the fabric off snip snip I'm very scared and unroll it and we'll see what it looks like as one whole piece of fabric alrighty so tada it's really nice honestly really excited to see how it prints then analyse sewed it all together into the full t-shirt [Music] link-state annalisa now have the completed t-shirt all woven and sewn together now and it's right for printing step 3 dyeing and printing there are two main ways to add color to clothing with a dye or with a pigment I'm gonna be using a combination of the two for my t-shirt and a few different techniques to get the desired final look but first let's collect and prep my dyes while growing the cotton I also attempted to grow a variety of different plant dies weld matter and chiusa green weed false indigo and wode but unfortunately all the plants more or less ended up dying during the first growing season that's the false indigo planted at the end of the year and didn't really sprout until like a month ago got a few of them here but I'm not gonna get any flowers from them dandy and the rest of my dye garden which nothing really grew everything died so next I constructed some hydroponic setups so I could grow them through the winter including some more tropical plants that I normally won't be able to grow in this climate like indigo [Music] but again a lot of these didn't sprout or ended up dying soon after so overall that left my available arsenal of dyes pretty limited but I was able to wind up with four dining options first up I have the turmeric I previously use this for tried to dye the candy corn and orange first arrived to me back then it was almost dead nursed it back to life and past couple weeks ago it just decided to die again so I think it's finally over now but be a good excuse to you now harvest it and extract the dye should be a really nice strong yellow gold dye if you ever spilled a food with turmeric in it you know how well it can stain if it's [Music] next I have walnuts I collected several years ago they were originally intended to use them as a brown dye but instead I've only so far used them to stain wood after I D husking them they're boiled in water then this solution can be used for steaming either wood or cloth a nice dark brown for a red dye I've collected the tiny insects called Cochin eel while I was in Mexico they live on the leaves of cacti and contain a strong dye called carminic acid jungle little bugs into a dye they just need to be crushed up boiled and strained and rinsed lastly well the word I had tried to grow at home had failed and died well in England I found the plant at bountiful supplied and was able to harvest a bunch their board contains the same blue pigment as its found in indigo to extract it the leaves are steeped in warm water then cooled and strained add some soda ash and aerate it and the blue pigment should settle out for my t-shirt I'm also gonna use a carbon black payment mix with the flaxseed oil now with some options for adding some color I just need to apply them in preparations for my own t-shirt I previously checked out a local screen printing and design house Franklin you to learn how to shirts today are printed he also came up with this crazy awesome design that I want to attempt to replicate a my t-shirt modern screen printing is pretty difficult to replicate from scratch but I should be able to do a process that was its predecessor block printing but first I want to use the dyes I collected in a way to add some color to the design so we do a process called resistant dyeing or use a wax to kind of cover the areas you don't want died and then you can control and dye to certain regions so I have the four different dyes and I took the design that Franklin you made for us before and broke it down into different dye regions which I then cut out of this material here paints wax over it to cover up what I don't want died then dye each region hopefully get a variety different colors and hopefully some interesting patterns probably dye the shirt itself overall [Music] [Music] [Music] we're going to prepare the road for the woke dye bath to do that I'm going to take this soda ash and mix it with about 80 degrees centigrade water so now that the road and soda ash solution has sat war about 30 minutes I'm going to dunk it into the actual dye pot I'm going to sprinkle sodium dithionite on top to die oxygenate the VAT so that there's no oxygen in it and the reaction will take place in the fabric when it gets lifted out [Music] so this is the final result of woad tie-dye I am pretty proud of this honestly it turned blue and that's all I could ask of it overall I think it's gonna look really good once it's all put together I think it looks good the dyes all taken care of the next step is a block print I dental East helped carve out the linoleum block through the design well I mixed up a new batch of black oil paint so I've finished with all the dying on the t-shirts got further decent results the turmeric and the whoa turned out really nice and the walnut the coach Neil kind of failure it was a feat pinkness to it but mostly it's all washed out the matted actually worked out pretty good three cool results I'm gonna do the very last step of walk rings which they've carved out of linoleum block here just got press it on there what's the black oil paint should be done project to thicken almost three years at this point so I think you do test run first make sure you don't mess it up right now it verdict [Music] all right I see she's as good as she's gonna get it's a print looks good yeah got hints of color yeah what's the doggy's Brown it at least went through and touched up with the ink and some of the dyed spots are washed out through all the different rinse scenes alright so here is the completed printed t-shirt all assembled in on me and just took about almost three years which makes us the longest-running project I've ever done for the series and it's been a huge pain to actually get this done I ended up having to add on Annalise to help me do this this project was a huge pain I think every step along the way I found things were a lot more complicated than they normally would be to make a t-shirt for starting with the cotton itself having to grow it this far north had its own challenges barely got enough cotton then after that I had to spin it having to learn the skill of spinning weaving it and then be able to get a decent printable fabric pulls a pretty nice image but because it's woven it lacks some characteristics of knit fabric and that it's not very stretchy makes it a pain to put on and then to print it was its own challenge of collecting all these different colors didn't necessarily work the best but made workable solution and print it by hand I think this really illustrates how much the t-shirt is a product of the Industrial Revolution and trying to create one without that just makes it a ton of work that's why in the end when I total up the total costs do mean I pay myself minimum wage which is about eight dollars right now all of my time and at least this time this ended up costing almost $5,000 that's really the difference these Industrial Revolution makes that a t-shirt you can get maybe as cheap as five dollars versus five thousand this is the product of a very inefficient production that costs five thousand dollars a little bit cheaper guys at Frank you put together this t-shirt but the original prints a little bit more affordable if you want to get it lit higher quality and they're also gonna sell some of our own prints using this block print and give some of these to our patrons guys can look forward to that this is our last video before we start making a slight change direction in our series in a small significant matter making everything including my tools from scratch which will result with me resetting back to the Stone Age and working my way up stay tuned for an announcement explaining this more later this week and a big thank you to our patrons we couldn't do this without your support and even then we struggled to make videos like these between the huge amount of manual labor they require if you're not a patron we deeply appreciate it if you became one I share weekly behind-the-scenes looks clips before they're released and monthly live streams where you get to voice where the channel's direction goes thanks for considering and thanks for watching thanks again in about chemistry for sponsoring this video here are the winners for our last drawing we did send us your email and we'll hook you up with your free six month subscription and here's your next chance to win your own free six month subscription to milk chemistry just answer this question in the comments what Disney character was popularly featured on t-shirts in the 1960s in a couple weeks we'll do a random drawing to select three lucky winners if you are too eager to wait to see if you won click the link below to get 25% off your first subscription to melt chemistry you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you enjoy these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 666,519

Rating: 4.9221687 out of 5

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Smart, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, Textiles, Industry, Technology, cotton, hydroponics, spinning, spinning cotton, electric spinning wheel, weaving, loom, diy loom, sewing, dye, fabric dyeing, printing, screenprinting, custom t-shirt, wood block, blockprinting, woad, indigo, death and dyeing, fast fashion, graphic tee, graphic tee shirt, tee

Id: E8NBsEQ4MKA

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/kelly_finny]

That woven t-shirt looked kind of sweet, actually. I'd pay more for one of those just for the look. Not $5,000 more, but yeah.

[u/satan_loves_you]

I'll take 10. How long for that?

[u/SeamusHeaneysGhost]

"Huuuuuuge pain" ..absolutely mate absolutely

[u/duckpolarbear]

Shit man, Andy’s still as insane as ever!!