fiber arts – FLC Innovation

16Mar 2019

Katazome in the Makerspace

Katia (student and President of the Asian Pacific Islander Club) collaborated with Innovation Center on a katazome activity for her club. Katazome is a Japanese fabric dyeing process that uses a resist paste applied to fabric through a stencil, and we more or less followed the procedure detailed in Workshop no. 21: Natural Selections: Hands-on Katazome and Indigo with Graham Keegan.

Early this morning, Katia made the dough using rice flour and rice bran…

…which we then steamed for an hour and half.

Meanwhile, we used the laser cutter to cut out some stencils, based on traditional Japanese designs.

While Katia smashed up the now cooked dough balls, adding glycerine and water with hydrated lime to make a paste…

…other members of the club arrived, and set to work cutting cotton fabric into 8″x8″ squares…

…and ironing the fabric to make it nice and flat for stenciling.

The paste ready, students set to work applying it to the fabric…

…and hanging the squares up to dry.

Once the squares were dry, it was into the dye for 20 minutes…

..then back on the line to dry again…

…before being rinsed.

The rinsed pieces now dry, Katia trimmed the edges with pinking shears…

…while other students pressed the finished squares using the t-shirt press in the Clean Lab.

The result!

It’s exciting to find ways to combine traditional arts – katazome – with digital fabrication – the laser cutter – and we’ll incorporate what learned (a lot!) about the process and timing into v2.0 of the activity in a couple of weeks.

More photos from the activity:

16Sep 2018

I Burned a SCOBY

by Zack ⋅ Leave a Comment

But just a little bit.

Took the crocheted SCOBY mat home to dry it out, and kept it overnight in a 120° F oven on parchment paper to dry it out.

The thicker side didn’t quite incorporate itself with the hemp fiber, owing I think to the fact that the crocheted piece was suspended slightly below the high tea/sugar mark.

In some places though, it seems as though the SCOBY really integrated with the mat.

The finished piece has an interesting flexibility because of the crocheted core.

I decided to try using SNO-SEAL, which is beeswax and some sort of solvent, to waterproof the mat. I melted some in an old pan on an outdoor stove, and plunged the SCOBY mat into it.

As I was turning off the flame, the pan caught fire, which was no big deal, and I extinguished it by putting a piece of metal over it. I didn’t realize, however that the mat itself was on fire, but was able to put it out quickly. I then placed the whole business on parchment paper and into the oven at 120° again for about 20 minutes, then buffed it out with some paper towels.

It definitely sheds water.

Our next experiments include creating magnetic SCOBY by incorporating iron filings into some fruit leather mush, and creating “leather” bracers for an upcoming fashion show.

07Jun 2018

Cats and Cross Training

by Zack ⋅ Leave a Comment

With the semester over, we’ve had some time to regroup and plan for the fall. One of our main goals this summer is to make sure that each staff member is comfortable on each fabrication process and machine. To accomplish this goal, the person most fluent in a particular process – 3D printing, or woodworking and power tools, for instance – is responsible for cross training all of the other staff.

Clarity (student and makerspace staff) is an accomplished fiber artist, and she’s been the point person for sewing in the Innovation Center since the Making Social Change class last fall. Her group created the A-Z of Planned Parenthood quilt for their final project, and she has become quite skilled at using our Baby Lock embroidery machine, most recently using it to create the embroidered bean bags…

…for the cornhole game we brought to Maker Faire.

As the resident expert, she’s been training up the other staff, and today, she spent the day working with Nicole (student and makerspace staff) to create a really amazing canvas tote with an image of Nicole’s Mom’s cat on it. Requiring multiple thread changes and lots of tweaking in the embroidery software, it took quite a while, and Nicole now feels confident in helping makerspace visitors through the embroidery process. The resulting artifact is truly magnificent!

flickr gallery of work-in-progress photos:

23Mar 2018

Software to Stitches

by Zack ⋅ 1 Comment

Brie Lindsey (from CCST) was out at the college the other day scouting rooms for the upcoming CCC Maker symposium, and dropped by the Innovation Center. Brie is an accomplished maker, with a lot of experience with sewing and other fiber arts, and she offered to help get the embroidery machine (which has a place to live, now that the fiber arts work table is built) up and running.

Brie showed me how to wind the bobbins and thread the needle, and after backing the fabric with stabilizer and mounting it to the smaller of the two embroidery frames, we let the machine do its work.

Here’s the view of the finished piece, analog and digital…

…and here it is framed up in the entrance to the space.

In parallel, I’ve been experimenting with TurtleStitch, essentially a mashup of Snap! (itself inspired by Scratch) and Logo that seems to be a perfect jumping off point for combining basic programming and automated embroidery. From the website:

Turtlestitch is based on a browser-based educational programming language (Snap!) to generate patterns for embroidery machines. It is easy to use, requiring no prior knowledge in programming, yet powerful in creating novel patterns for embroidery. It is useful for designers to experiment with generative aesthetics and precision embroidery as well as tool for innovative workshops combining an introduction to programing with haptic output.

Now that the machine is up and running, my plan is to work with faculty collaborators from Math, CIS, and ECE to develop activities and workshops using the software so that students can both program and sew. Software to stitches.

23Mar 2018

Building A Sewing Space

by Zack ⋅ 1 Comment

We recently finished building the furniture for our fiber arts area, which is in the Clean Lab and which houses our sewing machine, embroidery machine, and Lilypad Arduino gear. After gathering input from interested members of the college community, we chose the Kangaroo Kabinets Aussie II, which arrived in boxes and needed building. Nathaniel, Nathan, Rebekah and I unpacked and set to work.

The finished workstation is huge, but fits perfectly in the space. With this anchor piece of furniture, the Clean Lab is nearly complete!

11Dec 2017

Making and Advocacy in Action

by Zack ⋅ 1 Comment

Fired up by the sewing lab from a few weeks back, one of our Making Social Change groups ran with the quilt theme, creating an A-Z of Planned Parenthood quilt as their final group project. They used the laser cutter to cut various shapes and letters, and employed a variety of techniques, including embroidery and applique, to create their squares, and PVC pipe to assemble the frame. Here they are putting the finishing touches on their project.

On Thursday, December 7, representatives from Planned Parenthood tabled outside the Falcon’s Roost, and our students staffed the booth and displayed their quilt. They got a lot of foot traffic, answered a lot of questions, and distributed lots of literature, including some from built-in pockets on the quilt.

It’s great to see our students using their skills and passion to take a project from idea to application, and this project is a perfect example of exactly what we hoped would be the outcomes of this course when it was just some ideas on a whiteboard back in 2015.

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Tag Archives: Fiber Arts

Katazome in the Makerspace

I Burned a SCOBY

Cats and Cross Training

Software to Stitches

Building A Sewing Space

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