Rainbow's Story

Hi, my name is Rainbow and I’m a stuffed Afro unicorn. Did you know I started out as an oil underground? Can you believe that?! Let me tell you my story about how I went from oil to polyester fabric. It’s amazing!

First, I remember hearing a loud buzzing sound and then the ground opened up from a drill. Then I was sucked up through a pipe and sent to a factory. A petroleum engineer was probably the one who found me and designed a method to extract me. They likely worked hard to design methods that were faster, safer, and more efficient to get me out of the ground.

At the factory I was turned into a plastic bottle. They took me through a refining process where I was heated up. Then I went through steam cracking and polymerization to become the polymer polyethylene. Plastic and material engineers were definitely involved in this process. They helped to develop new plastics and methods of refining me. They may have even worked with petroleum engineers.

Once I was in bottle form, I had to be shipped out to stores for people to drink my contents. Since I held apple juice, I was pretty popular and sold right away! Luckily for me, that family recycled me and off I went to the next place. Industrial engineers would have designed the systems to get me to the stores quickly and efficiently so I could be sold for a cheaper price. Since industrial engineers make processes faster, they were a big part of how I got to the store so quickly.

Next, I went to the bottle recycling plant and I got picked up by a truck. The truck took me to the factory and the first stage was to shred the plastic bottles. After that, my plastic bottle pieces that were collected at the dump, needed to be dried out. So we spent about 10 hours rotating in the drying machine! When the machine was done drying the plastic, the workers had to move a giant cart back and forth to catch the pieces of plastic bottles as they fell. I got a little motion sickness here with all that movement! I'm pretty sure that a combination of civil, mechanical, and environmental engineers worked together to create this system to sort the bottles. Environmental engineers probably played a huge role in figuring out how to repurpose me for another job instead of throwing me out.

The dried plastic is sent through a big screw to melt. When it’s cooled down, the plastic is forced through a mold. Then it turns the plastic into the thin soft thing that we call thread! The thread is weak, so it’s stretched and combined. After they combined and stretched us, it was time to be torn apart again. My fur was sent to another factory to be turned into a cotton- like substance. After a lot of work, a machine finally scraped the substance and turned it into a hard thread! I went through a few more processes to make me nice and smooth and fur-like. One machine made the loops on my fabric and another tore the loops to make me nice and soft to the touch. I would bet my horn that a mechanical engineer helped design these machines to make me soft. They would have to think of a lot of really small and complex parts and get them to all work together.

I'm almost done with my journey now. I’m going from a big unicorn pattern of fabric to the stuffed model of me that I am today– an afro unicorn! Again, a mechanical engineer probably helped by designing the machines to sew my parts together and an industrial engineer figured out a way to mass produce me for an affordable price. A wet process engineer would have worked on dyeing my fur just the right color. There were probably a bunch of textile engineers working on the designs and fabrics for my embroidered eyes, horn, and overall outer appearance.

I was finally ready to be stuffed with stuffing made from Polyester fabric and Polyester fiber stuffing. This stuffing would have been created using the same process as my outer body, except it isn’t turned to thread and is left fluffy. Civil, mechanical, and environmental engineers would have helped this process, just like before.

So that’s my story of how I am here today! I TOLD you that story would be amazing! I went all the way from oil underground to a stuffed animal. Isn’t it amazing what engineers can do?