3. Circular Open Source Fashion¶

Research & Ideation¶

Below you can find the pinterest board I made for this weeek. It was hard to find credits for all the pictures, even with using Google Lens tool. I decided to share a screenshot and here you can access the board.

I also took a look at previous project from the Fabricademy Open Source Circular fashion catalogue and here are some of the works I found really inspiring:

The dragon scale top by Dima Hejap. Looking at her project, I thought: Is there a way I can avoid having unused material in between the pieces?

I found the work of Matija Côp also really fascinating

And Eunsuk Hur, I loved the complexity and how delicalty they expand in the space

And lastly, the project of Loes Bogers and how her design can be built in different ways

References & Inspiration¶

Eventualy I came up with the idea to make a garment for my collective, Crow Stitch. We draw inspiration from the moltitude of characters of the crow and engage with crafting in a collective form. It's funny, because we became so interested in crows only after founding this collective.

Some inspiration taken from our collective board on pinterest. Credit: 1 Julie Van Wezemael; 2 Samantha Hughes; 3 Bill Crisafi; 4 An illustration of a harpy from Jacob van Maerlant's "Der naturen bloeme" (The Flower of Nature); 5 The Wonders of Creation by Persian scholar Zakariy al-Qazwini; 6 Jeanie Tomanek; 7 Gerda Wegener; 8 I can't finf the original piece. Here's a link to the pin; 9 Lou Benesch; 10 Audery Audrey Niffenegger; 11 Matthew Houston

Tools¶

Cricut machine and software
Paper
Cutter
- Adobe Illustrator
- Laser cutter and Lightburn software
Textile

Steps¶

Create a tesselation work¶

While trying to understand how to create my design, I browsed the internet in search of inspiration and found this website called Instructables, which is an online community of makers that share their projects and fascinations. On this page Maker Studio explains very clearly, and with visual representation, how to make a tesselation work.

This is my attempt:

Once I understood this I designed my feather tesselation so there would be no space in between the feathers.

Why Illustrator

Testing the design!¶

I feel quite comfortable with the Adobe suite, I tried using Rhino but it was not as smooth and with the problems I encountered it was just more intuitive using Illustrator. I prepared some feathers before finishing the whole piece.

Now it is the time to do some tests! As I imagined the fether being embedded into each other. I designed two holes in the feathers and the point of the feather would act as the pin. I’m trying to align with the tech and audio movement of abandoning the sexist and non-inclusive terms "male" and "female". Some alternatives are "plugs" and "sockets", "pins" and "holes" or "prongs" and "slots".

Cricut¶

We used a cricut cutting machine to test on paper our design. You need to install the Cricut Software. The configuration steps are quite intuitive.

The paper model was meant to test the connection and the concept of the model. I also tested the slant of the holes since I wanted my design to open up as wings. I tested 5°, 10° and 15° of inclination. The best result was given but the 5°, otherwise the designed started to look odd.

Some more paper tests I tried at home:

Laser Cutter¶

Now it is time to taste the design with the fabric. Since the thickness of my material (2mm) we decided to use this setting:

Speed: 100
Max Power: 35
Min Piwer: 15

As I used a material of 2mm thickness, I tested slots of 2mm, 1.5mm and 1mm of thickness. It turned out that 1mm was enough as the material was uite soft and squeezable, then we also desided to keep the cuts of the slonts as only cut, without any extra space.

Adobe Illustrator¶

How to use illustrator to prepare a file for laser cutting

I prepared a file that is smaller compared to the cutting area of the laser cutter, I can always adjust later. I worked in mm
For some machines it might be important to use RGB as laser control software reads RGB color values to determine whether to cut or engrav. But it is not important for the machine we have
I mainly used the pen tooltool and lines, but if you use shapes make sure to do Object → Compound Path → Make to creagte a clear vector path.
Check that your shapes are closed and your path is continous, you can use the Selection Tool to select open shapes and/ore point then Object → Path → Join. From Path you can also Semplify shapes to reduce the number of points.
I didn't, but if you use font you can do Select Type → Font → Create Outlines from the top menu.
Thw Align and Distribute tool is also really helpful when working with multiple elemnts.
Duplicates are quite easy to find as the stokes appear darker than other cutting lines.
If you go to View → Outline you can see how the laser cutter will read the progect. Do this step quite often.
Tools such as Combine and Exclude are helpful to fix duplicates and make sure all your objects are on the same.layer.
To export you can File → Export → Export As. I exported my file as a pdf

This is the final model:

Remember how I said that checking often the Outline and Preview view is important? Well, that's because I made a mistake here. Some of the lines I drew did not show. I'm not completly sure what went wrong, as I tried working mainly in the outline mode to see how the laser cutter would see my file. What I noticed going back to my illustrator file is that some lines were white and so they did not show.

This is the final and correct model¹: I had to cut the lines that did not show in the file we printed myself. I used a cutter and tried to be as precised as possible.