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3. Circular fashion#
The idea of designing a small piece that you could multiplicate and interlock together to create a garment/ or other 3D shapes without any seams or stitches, is just amazing ! Anybody could just draw and cut out the same model on a piece of fabric (recycled, old clothes, your grandma’s unused tablecolth,…) then assembling to any shape wanted.
My Inspiration#
My instant inspiration was creating one/ or more models inspired by Cymatics. A topic I had discovered just a week before, and wanted to integrate those fantastics patterns in a perfect fitted project.
Before going into more detail of what it is I recommend to watch the full video of Nigel Stanford, where he creates a whole music video by showing amazing visual effects of Cymatics :
Cymatics#
The law of vibration
The third of the seven Universal Laws tells us that “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates”. The third and last of the immutable Universal Laws, tells us that “the whole universe is but a vibration”. Science has confirmed that everything in the Universe, including you, is pure energy vibrating at different frequencies.
- “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”. - Nikola Tesla *
Design#
For the design, I used Illustartor software to draw directly on the examples of cymatics I found and exported from Pinterest.
The number of pieces you want to lasercut will depend on the size you’d like to have the belt. As choose to do a size S. Which you can see a digital image below :
There are 48 pieces for this size of belt.
Laser Cutting#
Download the illustrator file here below :
Machine settings#
It was quite tricky to find the right settings for this type of leather as it was extremely thin.. I went with : Speed (140) ; Power (50). It was the only setting I found that cut the leather through with the least burn. I still had to clean them after as it happen to be white leather..
( Side note : the white leather was the less stinky after being laser-cutted.. )
Assembling#
Here is a quick schematic drawing of how to interlock the pieces together. But of course you can proceed however you’d like!
Here you can see the brown leather pieces assembled together into a belt. The amount of holes of each individual piece makes the garment quite stretchy. I will therefore make a base for the piece and hand-stitch everything together for more stability and a nicer ‘inner look’. (Preferably, you’ll need to take a quite transparent fabric to keep the ‘see-through’ effect given by the holes.) You could interlock the middle-front pieces together to close the garment, but you can also choose a more classic system with a zipper, crochets,…, maybe hidden underneath on the base part.