Fiber Portfolio 3

I hope you all had a happy Halloween! Here is the third installment of my Fibers portfolio from freshman year; soon I'll put up pictures of the costume I made myself last week.


Apart from knitting and crocheting we also had to do weaving. The tiny weave above was done on a frame loom, that is, a picture frame turned into a miniature loom. I like to think of it as some kind of tiny moon-and-mountain-scape.


The rest of our required techniques all involved printing or dying of some kind. Above is a detail of one of my Shibori samples. Shibori is a Japanese practice of sewing and wrapping silk (or linen, in my case) tightly with string or thread and then dying it, allowing the string to create patterns where the dye cannot penetrate. This example was done by wrapping peaks of fabric and dying with several different colors.



These two were the stitched Shibori. You can see in the details below how the fabric has been crimped by the thread I pulled through it. (These are poor examples for Shibori - had I done them better the light areas would be free of dye. It's really hard!)




And last but not least, here is my blockprinting sample. You can see the pattern I made for this in this photo. I cut two symmetrical foam 3"x3" squares into stamps and made a two color pattern out of them. I quite like this.

Fiber Portfolio 1

This is old news; the second semester of my freshman year I was in a class called Intro to Fibers. More about process than concept, much of the spring was spent learning new ways to create, dye, embellish or print things, and at the end of the class a portfolio was due of examples displaying our mastery of the techniques explored. Above is the box I created to house my portfolio, fulfilling the "something machine sewn" requirement.


The inside of the box is seen above, as well as some of the contents.


Above is my felting sample. In class, our teacher said, "Of course, it's impossible to felt an exact square, and you should probably just get close and then cut it afterwards if that's what you want." Being a contrarian, this was my attempt at a perfect square.


Next is twining, or coiling. This is a basket making or sculptural process where you wrap yarn (or twine, duh) around some more yarn (or twine) and occasionally thread it back through the preceeding coils to make a form. I wanted to do something difficult (duh) so this is my twined sphere.


Another basket making process, here we have the basket weave. Colorful! Cube!


We also had to have an 'extra' technique displayed; I picked screenprinting, and printed this fabric which became the inside of the box at the same time as these shirts.