experimental photo

Just a picture one of my friends took at the critique, me standing between my two creepy figures. I can't get over how tired I look in this photo. I promise I wasn't about to drop dead here - I just get very, very serious when describing my concepts to the judges (they're a little intimidating) - but I kind of get a kick out of how it really looks.

Also, please disregard the knitted cast-on tail sticking out of the right piece, and how I didn't tie my new piece tight enough and it left a hole (it's gone now). But can you see what I mean about the shoes on the girls now? It definitely disrupts the look.

experimental design final critique

My classmates were talking about everyone's concepts, and I guess mine came up and someone asked what it was, and one of my friends said "It's like when you cut your face off and you become a blob."

Well, not quite, but I love it anyway.

A refresher of the concept is how without faces, souls, personalities, or spirits, we as human beings are nothing more than anatomical masses. For the final show if this gets in (which I believe it has, since my experimental design professor told me to make the remaining 3 from my sketches for it), I will be fixing the foot pieces to fit over the heels (I made an error in pattern drafting that didn't allow for that to be possible in the critique, and of course the guest designer pointed it out). But overall I am very happy with the results. More (professional) pictures soon!

dyed roving process

They say it takes a village, and it did. Dyeing this stuff was exhausting, and I never want to smell coffee again. But, it did the trick better than I would have imagined and I couldn't be happier with the results!

On the left: before, white, and after, toffee. At right, a sketch in my notebook with my two fabric swatches.

The process, in a nutshell:

With about 7 pounds of wool, I had to divide this up into multiple batches (probably about 6 by the time I stopped dyeing ... couldn't do it anymore!) Simply, wool is a protein fiber and therefor needs heat and acid for color to take (usually a mordant as well, so it is colorfast, but since this is an "experimental" garment it will never be washed so I skipped this step - but a mordant for wool would be vinegar). I used coffee to dye the wool so I could get a warm, toffee-like color. I brewed about 30 cups of coffee for each batch, and then brought it to a boil and then turned down the heat a bit and submerged the wool, topping it off with a little more water if needed to cover all of it. With wool, you need to be careful about heat and agitation - wool will felt when agitated in hot water, so you "poke" it with a spoon instead to disperse color evenly.

And then I ran out of coffee. I didn't want to use any "nice" coffee (so my dad's sacred cabinet of foreign coffee beans and Starbucks grounds were safe), but at 30 cups per let's say 1/2 pound, that was going to take a lot ... for 7 pounds. Then my dad gets this great idea: to call the local cafe, and ask what they do with their leftover coffee at the end of the day. He called them up and sure enough, they toss it, so we asked if we could have it. I'm pretty sure that's the only time I'll ever enter a restaurant with a beer-brewing sized stock pot. But, they had several gallons worth of coffee to give me and I successfully dyed the rest of my wool.

The fun part however comes after all the wool dyeing. Well, besides the wet wool and coffee smell I had my head in for a few hours. After dyeing wool, you need to rinse it (once cooled, so it doesn't felt) to allow for excess dye to run off. I had to sit in the tub with all my wool (which looked a lot like intestines, it was kind of gross) and squish it around in the water for a good 45 minutes til coffee stopped pouring out of it. The last time I dyed wool, it took around 3 days for it to air-dry, but I didn't have 3 days, so instead I hand-squeezed every last length of it before laying all of it out on a towel-covered drying rack. In the morning it was mostly just damp, so I took a blow dryer to it and wound it all into 7 nice balls of toffee fluff.

At left, "Duck Season" spray paint. Right, a sprayed swatch to match the dyed fibers.

But from here I wasn't really done. I still had to knit the thing. This was like a wrestling match - it took so much effort for each stitch and once the knit piece started getting big (and heavy) it was hard to maneuver around. I also had to tap into my undyed supply of wool to complete it ... which meant I needed to do something about the color change. Spray paint was just about the only thing I could think of, but I wasn't sure how it would work. However, the store had a color that was almost exactly that of my dyed wool, so I bought it and tested it out. It couldn't have matched better. I used it to "melt" the white wool color into the toffee color and make it look like one (which it thankfully does now) and also to add a little color discrepancy for a more organic look. I am very happy with the final result.

Well that's enough for now, our experimental critique begins tomorrow at 8:00 AM and the moment of truth will arrive when I finally get to see it all together! Got shoes for the models today, so everything is ready to go. I will take lots of pictures.

a quick teaser

I had something arrive for me in the mail today, as a part of my experimental design. As you may remember, I am doing nude bodysuits and one has a roving oversize-knit "body sock" over the top (I posted the drawings in a post further down). The critique is December 2nd, so I will be sewing like crazy pretty soon! But the pressure is off; I was worried the roving wouldn't get here in time because I need to dye all of it first. Now, however, I'm just excited!

The first photo is the neoprin - a very thick, double-knit material used for scuba diving. Neoprin is a little thinner and stretchier than neoprene, used for wetsuits. In the next photo, look at how big that box is! That is 7 pounds of natural merino roving, which you can see better at bottom left. It is ridiculously soft and even thicker than what I used to knit my swatch sample, bottom right, with my specially-ordered size 42 knitting needles (I couldn't find these in a store anywhere). I am excited at how lofty the roving is - means my stitches will be just slightly bigger. I am so excited to start knitting this!

I will document the dyeing process, since it is sort of interesting to see how it is done. I will be doing it in the bathtub while I am home for Thanksgiving break - not putting my perfect wool in my college house bathtub here, no way. Just thought I'd give you a sneak peak of the materials! For our critique, we will have a professional photographer, so expect some "photoshoot" type things in about two weeks.

experimental design final concept

First of all, I apologize for my lack of time commitment this week - I have been so busy! Since I don't have any particular trends or topics on my mind, I'll show you what I've been working on all week long - developing my concept and five designs for my experimental mini collection. We will execute two of the final looks.

The collection is titled Defaced; the research behind it was a little extensive so I'll sum it up in a nutshell. I started by thinking about the concept of the human soul (the mental and emotional house of the body) and the spirit (the animating component of the body) and how without them, we are nothing more than lumps of flesh and anatomical parts, something strictly physical. Then I began thinking about what defines us as human anyway, and how humanity is something that cannot be learned, it is innate. And that one of the most defining features of a human being is the face - in terms of communication, that is. Without a face, it is hard to read emotions or even converse with someone. We put faces on everything - pareidolia is the name for when we find faces in clouds, discovered the "man on the moon", or try to anthropomorphize inanimate objects by giving them faces. We automatically identify with a stuffed animal more than a chair, yet both are simply physical objects; but because the animal has a face, we feel a "connection" to it. Babies innately learn feel an attraction to faces - a circle with a triangle in the middle gets no reaction yet a circle with two dots and a straight line does, even though it doesn't exactly resemble a detailed face.

Then I started thinking about people who have facial paralysis, or even face transplants - something I find horribly creepy and fascinating at the same time. There are only four completely successful full facial transplants recorded, and this amazes me that this exists. Patients often feel "different" after a full face transplant, because what they see in the mirror isn't the person they have been used to seeing and even though they are the same person, they look different, and have trouble identifying themselves after. And then there are disorders with the fusiform component of the brain that identifies faces, so some people cannot recognize a face at all. I stumbled upon a French film then called Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face), a black and white movie about a woman who needs a face transplant after a car accident, her body rejects the face, and has to wear a white plastic mask with holes only for her eyes for the rest of her life. Here is a condensed version of the movie, with a perfectly creepy song in the background. I'd love to watch a copy of the full thing one day.

So that lead me to my ultimate concept, about how we are simply physical entities when we don't have the humanizing features of a face, eyes, a soul, or spirit. For my five designs, I chose to do a series of bodysuits that will be constructed with neoprene, to preserve opacity and create a sort of smooth "skin" over the body. I will distort the common human figure by adding sheer webbing between certain limbs and neoprene webbing between others, and then covering the faces of some figures with a thick knitted bodysock or oversize turtleneck. The knitwear will be done with unspun roving, to achieve huge two-to-three-inch stitches. All fabrics will be in varying, unmatched shades of nudes and skin tones. The bodysuits will have invisible zippers in the back for removal, and the suits will cover the face, hands (like a mitten, so no fingers are showing), and the feet (in a way that the heels the models wear will fit into the bodysuit so they have a covered high-heel shape instead). I don't think my models will like this because they will not be able to see, but that was sort of the point.

The two looks I will end up executing will most likely be the last two. I was originally going for the first and third, but during the critique my classmates mentioned that they look a little too human, and they are absolutely right. This is why critiques are so helpful! The fourth body suit has one arm enclosed within, and the fifth has both enclosed with the knitwear on top.

I am very excited to start this project. The neoprene will be an investment, but it will definitely achieve the look I want. I will keep updates on this!

experimental design sketches

Not feeling very inspired today, so I thought that maybe I'd just post a little bit about the sketches I'm working on for my experimental design class.

Note the word experimental ... the first dress was for our origami assignment, to use a material that is pliable. I chose to work with the ziploc component of a plastic ziploc bag, because you can snap them together and form strips to create something much like a Herve Leger bandage dress. The idea is a little racy, since the material is completely transparent, but that was the point - to challenge how she feels secure and safe locked inside, much like anything would be when placed into a ziploc bag, yet is completely exposed. The second dress is for the armored assignment, to use a material that can be linked together. This is supposedly a lingerie look, where the PVC pipes are linked to form a sort of cage around the body to cover certain parts, and then has a very fine-gauge copper wire "knit" billowing out from underneath. None of these things need to be doable or comfortable, so it is all in theory. I'm pretty sure no one would want to wear a pipe to bed. But, you know. Makes you think. I love to illustrate, and I love that you can design without financial or logical limitations when you draw.