Textiles

One of the first..and probably one of the most exciting projects we did at college was Constructed Textile project which somehow turned into and amazing yarn bombing collaboration! And if you have never heard of yarn bombing, you should definitely google it..or better click here! But anyway, on the very first day of the project I finally learned how to knit! (some people were already amazing at it! but How?!)..So we hand and machine knitted..we made felt, we made sailing knots..and we also learned how to finger-knit from our friend Anna! And, finger knitting is what took this already great project to a whole new level!

Im not going to go in details about how and why and who came up with this amazing idea because that’s not really that important since it was a collaboration and everyone worked really hard on it (..and also because I just cant remember) but anyway! For the final piece we decided to make a lot of long pieces of finger knitting (It’s surprisingly quick and easy way of knitting!) and some machine knitted pieces and use the idea of yarn bombing to secretly decorate the most popular space in our college! Soo, we took all the pieces we knitted, tied them together and during the lesson we quickly put it up. And this is what it looked like:

And the best part isn’t the fact that when the lesson finished no one could figure out what was it all about and how did it get there but the fact that it made college look more Christmassy (and it was that time of the year) and so we didn’t have to take it down, right after we created it..in fact it was taken down after few months and only because the space was needed for the end of the year show! And most importantly it really was a big part of our college life because since we put it up until the very end we secretly kept adding to it so it was an ongoing project which a believe almost everyone at college really liked and got attached to. Even if they didn’t quite know why it was there! Below I included some more pictures where you can clearly see how it evolved! So I hope you like it, and please look forward to my next post!

The two-day printed textiles project was one of those projects where we could be as experimental as we want which means that for me it was very interesting and enjoyable. The aim of it was to produce a map that would lead for Christopher Columbus to the New World. We experimented with three different screen printing techniques that we could then use to make our map.

First technique was Polychromatic screen printing which is when you paint whatever you want to print directly onto the silk screen. (The colours in this technique are very vivid so its important to remember that if you want lighter colours you need to use water to paint the screen first). Once the design is on the screen you wait for it to dry and then use a binder to print it on the fabric.

Second technique was Stencil printing for which we had to design and make a stencil. To print using this technique you have to masking tape the stencil onto the middle of the silk screen and then put the newspaper around it so the ink will only go through the stencil.

Third technique was Photographic printing which allows you to print more detailed designs and you can print as many copies as you want since the design is created permanently on the screen. The design can be created on computer and it is important to remember that the machine that puts the design on the screen recognizes only black and white colour so our design shouldn’t have any colors or shading but only strong shapes. Below I included some of the experiments that I created that day so i hope you like them!:)