4. Biofabricating Dyes and Materials#

Bio plastic swatch book first version#

via GIPHY

From mixing various ratios of the heated mixtures to immersing existing textiles, I created a bio plastic mini portfolio.

Making of Bio plastics#

This week we are experimenting on different qualities on bio plastics and natural/ bacterial dyes.

Tools: Cooker/stove/hotplate, Teaspoon, Measuring Cup, Cooking pot, Scale, Thermometer.

The sample pieces mostly became less flexible through the evaporation of internal moisture, being stiff and rigid, although some with more air bubbles or thiner sheets were a bit more fragile.

It was difficult to achieve the flexibility of textiles, except the tests completed with soap foam, which takes longer time to dry, leaving some time to possibly acting like textiles.

Most of the samples followed this recipe on Materiom Website: https://materiom.org/recipe/22, as I was

Composition: Glycerol 12 grams Water 240 ml grams Gelatin 48 grams

Natural Dyes#

From natural dyes, I discovered that pressing wet dyed yarns onto paper or tissues would leave very interesting marks full of narratives.

Bacteria Dyes on organic fabrics#

Procedure:

1. Enter the wetlab and close the door behind you to reduce external airflow interrupting the sterilized lab environment.
2. Wear a lab coat to prevent excessive bacteria climbing onto your clothes, tie up your hair and roll up sleeves as well.
3. Wash your hand with alcohol to kill the bacterias brought from outside.
4. Place prepared (stitched/ folded/ crumbled) piece of fabric in glass petri dishes. If only plastic petri dishes are available, place fabric in a heat resisting plastic bag in order to sterilize. (Plastic petri dishes don’t survive in high temperature)
5. Prepare LB broth: mix 2.7G of LB powder with every 100ml of water, shake well and store in a heat resisting glass bottle, with a heat sensitive tape on the top of the lid.
6. Place glass petri dishes, plastic bags of fabrics and bottles of LB broth in the pressure cooker, remember to loosen the lid of the LB broth bottle so then it would not explode under high pressure.
7. Turn the pressure cooker on, seal it well and wait.
8. When the red button on the lid pops up, reduce heat and wait for it to go down again.
9. Once the pressure cooker has completed the sterilisation, take the plastic bags, glass petri dishes and LB broth bottle out.
10. Squeeze alcohol all around the work table. Place a gas burner at the middle of the work area, light it up with a gas lighter, to create a circular sterilized working environment.
11. Take some empty plastic petri dishes on the table, for transferring the sterilised fabrics from plastic bags to these dishes.
12. Sterilise a pair of tweezers and take the sterilised fabrics out of the plastic bags, open the lid of an empty cleaned petri dish then quickly transfer in it. Close the lid.
13. Open the lid of LB broth close to the gas burner and sterilised the opening, again open the lid of the petri dish with fabrics and gently drip liquid onto the fabric until it is immersed.
14. Take out the petri dish with JL bacteria, out of the incubator.
15. Sterilize your inoculation loop tip for a couple of a second on the gas burner, quickly open the lid of the petri dish with bacteria and touch your loop tip on the parts away from the bacteria to cool down. After hearing a sizzling sound from the loop tip, raise it and scratch on the bits with bacteria, close the lid and open the lid of the glass petri dish with fabrics, touch on the surface of fabrics then close the lid again.
16. Seal your bacteria inoculated petric dishes with fabrics with parafilm, then place in the incubator for them to grow a kingdom out of it:) (make sure the double doors of the incubator is securely shut)
17. Seal and place your original bacteria petri dish back to the incubator as well for next time.
18. Wipe the table top with alcohol, turn off the gas burner and place all equipments back to the shelf, or throw away to a medical discard bin if they are for single use.
19. Wash your hands with alcohol, take off your lab coat and hand back onto the hanger, make sure the lab had gone back to its original state before you used it, exit the lab and close the door behind you.

Bacterial dyes on silk