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Process

First Ideation, Sketches and Prototypes

Everything i did up until the change of the project is put in the presentation bellow.

The personal project development by Valentina Frunze

Mentoring notes

Mentors in all sessions may share with you their comments, notes, advise, projects and technical equipment to check out. This is good place to share those, so that you can find them later on when you need them the most!

Going back to concept, idea and sketching

After analyzing the idea i had for the project with my mentors we saw that it was going nowhere and it was decided to create a completely different project and to start everything from the beginning in the last week before the final presentation.

Concept 2 | Bringing the Roots to the Present

Project Concept BRP by Valentina Frunze

Design & Fabrication

Embroidery pattern making

And so i started my work by first thinking of a story and what object can best represent it. I choose my grandmother embroidery that is a gift from her to my mother. And i want to take a part of it with me. So i decided to create a project that will be based on the idea of tradition and present. Bringing the past to the present.

Laser cutting process

Based on this scheme i cut my canvas at the laser so i have the base to embroider on. The diametre of the circles was 5mm. The canvas design was made directly in the lasser cuter app, so i can have the maximul width of what i can cut. My approach to this was based on the idea to get as many circles as the laser will allow me in a maximum of 50 cm width of the felt i had.

Bio-dyeing process

Then came the fun part of selecting, preparing and dying the threads, that were seminatural (50% cotton and 50% polyester). All the recepies were taken from the Biochrome week.

The first step in any dying process is to prepare the fibers and textiles. This is done by weighting the fibers (WoF). We will need the WoF for future recipes for the dyeing process. Everything begins with the scouring process, that is a process in which we clean our fibers. For the semi natural threads i used 2 spoons of sodium bicarbonate to 4l of water. The next part is the mordanting step. This is a substance, typically an inorganic oxide, that combines with a dye or stain and thereby fixes it in a material. As my mordant I used Alum. The ratio was 10 % of WoF. After all of the above is done, I started to prepare the dye bath.

Based on my previous experience with the color modifications I used specific ingredients for the colour I wanted. For the greens I selected the blueberry, red cabbage and hibiscus. For a beige and brown colours I used avocado pits and onion peels. And for the red and violets colors I used beetroot and red cabbage.

Because the thread is semi-natural, it can be seen that as a result of bio-dyeing the colors are not as intense. The obtained colors are calmer and pastel.

The embroidering process

After i prepared everything, i started my embroidery.

Result

And here is the final result!

Fabrication files


Last update: 2023-05-01