"Grow your own clothes" -Suzanne Lee (TED)

Designer Suzanne Lee shares her experiments in growing a kombucha-based material that can be used like fabric or vegetable leather to make clothing. The process is fascinating, the results are beautiful and the potential is simply wonderful.

Suzanne Lee recently joined the biotechnology start-up as its creative director.
"You can actually have a dress growing in a vat of liquid." Lee says. “Imagine leather that’s as lightweight and transparent as a butterfly wing or has the natural stretch of rubber” In nature, such qualities rise from the spontaneous assembly of biological cells. Manipulating cell cultures, scientists at Modern Meadow can customize a material’s strength, texture, weight, and elasticity. It’s an idea Lee hopes will take fabric—and with its fashion—in an entirely new direction.

“What’s fundamentally changed is our ability to look at materials in nature and say, with a straight face, that we can potentially make them with biotech,” says Dan Widmaier, Bolt Threads’s chief executive officer. I thing that could benefit fabric manufacturers, but more importantly, it could benefit the environment. Most existing materials have a significant downside: Cotton farming uses intensive pesticides, and synthetic fabrics such as polyester are made with petroleum. The roughly 14 billion square feet of leather produced from bovines annually requires millions of animals, consuming billions of gallons of water and pounds of feed a day—to say nothing of the methane emissions. Lee says of her fabric: “It use less water, hell yeah. Low energy, absolutely. Less chemicals, less dyes. Throw it in the garden when you’re finished with it.”

Lee founded a design consultancy called Biocouture in order to accelerate the development and the adoption of new biological materials
She made a collection of coats using the microbial cellulose: a bomber jacket, a denim-style jacket, a biker jacket. Although the designs were conventional, they looked otherworldly and slightly translucent. “Production from bacteria is so alien,” she says, that she wanted to create familiar garments to show it wasn’t so strange.

She grew the material at home, Lee exactly in her bathtub. As it dried, it becoming into a substance similar to the leather. But she found that it absorbed plant dyes more easily than normal fabric.

“This is potentially revolutionary,” she says, then laughs. “Oh lord, there’s a fashion designer trying to save the world.”

Step 1 - Preparation of the culture liquid.

This first step lasts about 1h.

1-Boil water
2-Let the tea infuse for 15min.
3-Dilute sugar
4-Let the mix cool down. (Temperature under 30º Celsius)


Step 2 - Setting up the SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast)
This step lasts about 5 minutes. It is very important that the liquid is below 30°Celius, before adding the other ingredients: - to prevent odor vinagar emission - not to kill the starter and SCOBY.

5- Pour the vinegar + add mix previously madre + The starter mix
6- Add your Scoby too.
7- Cover the tray and protect it from the light.

Step 3 - Fermentation ste
This stage lasts about 15 days. If you want a thin sheet, a Baby Scoby 5 min thick enough. If you want a fabric like leather, wait your baby Scoby do about 2cm.

8- Let stand 5 days, and Baby Scoby will start to grow.
9- Regularly spread gently the Baby Scoby to get rid of bubbles.

Step 4 - End of culture and start drying
You can dry your SCOBY on a board of wood or plastic, glass, .... According to the media, the end result will be different!

10- Hand wash your Scoby with soapy cold water.
11- Dry your Baby Scoby on a leaned wooden board.

Step 5 - Congratulations!

You can also dye, sew, cut, print on your Scooby! This is only the beginning.


https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes#t-274258