6. Textiles as Scafolds#

WEEK 6: TEXTILE AS SCAFOLDS

Crystallization

Sugar Crystal Recipe:
400ml of Water
150ml of Sugar

Process: String Crystilazation 1. Boil Water 1. Add Sugar into water. Do it at a table spoon at a time 1. Stir occasionally. When sugar starts to settle down at the bottom we are good to go 1. Pour sugar solution into a beaker (glass container) 1. Wrap string around pencil and dip into glass container

Grow a Sugar Crystal Mold
I wanted to experiment to see if I could grow crystals in the same manner as creating a mold in order to shape it to my liking. Similar to the process of creating a mold I took a negative a chestnut that we had in the lab, layed a piece of fabric down and pour the sugar mixture into the negative. The end results came out decent. The sugar solidified and held the shape of the mold but there were alot of error areas.

Salt + Alum Crystallization: Process of creating the Salt + Alum crystals is similar to the process of creating sugar crystals mentioned above.
- Black - Alum bath with acrylic design submerged
- Orange – Alum with food coloring droplets
- Clear – Alum bath with wood design submerged
- Blue – Salt + Alum solution (half a table spoon of salt to alum solution

WOOD TEXTILES

Laser Cutter Settings:
Speed: 2
Power: 60
Frequency: 1000hz

Materials:
Felt
Pine Wood
Hot glue

Process
1. First step of the process is creating the design/pattern that you will glue onto the fabric. For my design I sought out organic patterns for inspiration. After a quick google search I decied to go with two patterns. First one is a zebra print and the second one is a pattern made by grapefruit slices.
2. Download the images
_IMAGES SOURCES:
_ Zebra Pattern
GrapeFruit Slice Patter
3. Once images are downloaded, convert them into vector files for the laser cutter. For this process I used Adobe Illustrator and the tool "Image Trace". Image trace basically scans the images and converts the imag into adjustable vectors and points. There are a variety of settings that you can choose from but for this process we will use the simple black and white conversion setting since all we need is the outline vectors.
4. Set up Laser Cutter
5. Cut wood
6. Assemble Pieces of Wood: For me the easiest and quickest way to do this was taking the last cut block of wood flipping it upside down, lathering the pieces of wood that I want to attach to the fabric with glue and then placeing the fabric ontop of the block of wood for about 10 minutes. This way instead of gluing each piece one by one we can glue a bunch at one time. ### Files Patterns (Illustrator) (Right Click > "Save Link As")