The Next 100 Days

Show Promos: Knit Posters

2009-04-26T23:18:00.000-07:00

Way back when, I posted a knit poster I had made, that had taken entirely too long to create in bulk. Well, our end design turned out really successful. Basically, I designed punchcards for each of the 4 sections of text. Then my team of knitters, actually 90% Emily in knitting monitor-mode, knit away long bands of each punchcard in different color combinations. I then washed the long blanket-like pieces, and sewed 2 rows of zigzag stitch between each portion of knitted text and cut the different sections apart from one another. A tag-team effort at the linking machine meant Emily and I were able to get all the posters finished just in time. We were aiming for 20 posters, but we ended up with 26! That's amazing! We even had a spare date portion to sew over the larger poster that had been knit with the wrong date. Anyways, I put them all up in our studio to get the other kids excited about our show and to take a picture of them all before they were put up, and inevitably stolen.

Before these pieces were reattached to the rest of their posters. I just thought this would be an awesome picture for the Textiles portion of the school's look book (instead of the random stuff they have had the past few years)

Show Promos: The Beach

2009-04-25T22:57:00.000-07:00

I couldn't show these guys until after the show was over, because I didn't want to ruin the surprise for anyone in Providence. The Textiles show is always one of the best advertised shows, because we are one of the only majors who do not have any other space to display our work. Our senior show is a big deal to us, so we want to make people excited about it.

First off, we created a 3D stuffed letter sign for this huge brick wall on the tiny patch of grass (known as the beach) that sits in the center of our "campus". Students signed up for 1 or 2 letters and my friend Emily and I devised a way to hang all the letters up together. This project made me very happy to work on because it was so collaborative and the results were very diverse.

The shining E was covered in reflective tape. MY face is saying "Wow, it's cold out here" But this is the only picture I have with our sign.

These are some of the only pictures I have of our beloved sign, because only 2 nights after we put it up, someone, actually a couple drunken someones, came and tore our sign apart. Only 2 letters were hanging by morning. The general code around school about signage or promo stuff is that stealing is fine, but only after the event. It was only Wednesday, our opening was Thursday, and we were totally bummed. So, I got together a bunch of fabric we had sitting in our studio free bin, sewed them together, and made a quick retaliation sign. While I was making it, someone suggested the "2.0" which I thought would add a nice touch. Here it is in it's hanging glory, back on the beach (which is really a patch of grass):

Preparing for our Show

2009-04-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a bunch of materials to promote out Senior Show. I would post pictures, but I will wait till after they have been put up so the people who actually get to see them in person are still surprised.

Also, I've been preparing & organizing the things of mine I want in the show. I will be putting in several pieces from this semester & I also want to bring some optional pieces from last year. These are the older ones I'm thinking of:

Website Update

2009-04-05T14:45:00.000-07:00

In preparation of the whole job search & application process, I've updated my Portfolio Website. Check it out!

Photo Shoot 2.0

2009-04-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

Monday is out 2nd interim crit. So, in preparation, I had a shoot for my projects. Here is my snowflake dress on Saera. I'm really happy with it!

Here are my ideas for the gold leaf piece. The tape is supposed to show the ares with gold leaf. It will still be cut to accent the structural knit pattern, like the sample I made.

I love the back, but I wanted to break the pattern up more in the front. I don't know if I am fully convinced I like this particular solution.

New Project Ideas

2009-04-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

So now that I am done with my laborious dress, here is my newest experiment-turned project.

Here is a sample of gold leaf on my test sleeve. I am now mapping out the bigger picture of how I want the gold leaf ares to be arranged on the body.

Here She Is!

2009-03-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

Spring Break is done and so is the snowflake dress/ tunic (other than sewing in the threads).

Sleeveless?

2009-03-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

It's Spring Break week here, which actually means I've been in studio more than average. It's much quieter and so much easier to work when all the facilities are open and no one else wants to use them.

Remember this sweater?

3am, about to leave for the night on Thursday, I was playing around with pieces on my desk, and I made this thing out of two sweater sleeves:

Maybe it was the early-morning tiredness, but I was really into the fact the I made something sleeveless with two sleeves. So I built on that idea. I wanted to add my own newly knit pieces to the bottom, but they needed to relate to the original piece in some way. I decided to try and play with the snowflake motif on the sweater that is a really typical fair-isle sweater motif. My initial ideas were way too literal:

Then, after a good chat with my friend and fellow Textile-r, Emily, and some much-needed dinner, I cranked out this muslin:

Look at those "awesome" photoshop skills (aka, the skirt part of this picture was not really black but it will be so I re-colored it). Ok, now time fore more photoshop!

I decided to add a gradient to the knit sleeves for several reasons. First, I had already experimented on them with ugly christmas colors, stupidly, and I had to hide that. Second, I thought it would be a good way to connect the old and new pieces as the patterning would disolve into black. The whole design in patterned off of triangular shapes, the most obvious one being the central one continuing the lines down from the sleeve.

And here is what happened when I dyed the knit sleeves. We don't have toxic-enough chemicals in our dye lab to dye a true black, so I unexpectedly just added a color to my otherwise black and white piece. Whatever, go with the flow has kind of been the name of the game with this project so far, so I am not so worried about it.

Lots of work I failed to post.

2009-03-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

This is a piece I worked on last week, but didn't write about because I got blog-lazy.

I got this sweater and really liked the structural pattern, but I thought it was a bit too subtle, so I decided to add pigment to it, hoping that I would be able to just get the raised layer, and thus, bring out the structural pattern.

I played around with different ways to quickly change the drape and add more definition to the waist.

I cut off one of the sleeves and played around with the printing. My goal was to try and get only the protruding parts of the fabric. It took a bit of improvising, but I figured out a method that worked somewhat consistently. The last test is the upper left corner.

A few days later, I finally had the guts to just sit down and work on the actual piece. I had to take the whole garment apart in order to lay the pieces down to print on them.

Here is the piece as it stands. After printing, I had to hand steam each section for 15 min, hand wash 3 times, and sew it back together.

I'm definitely not done with this one yet.

The First Sleeve

2009-03-11T20:43:00.001-07:00

I saw this sweater, and immediately thought it would be swell if the front portion could become a sleeve. Shape-wise, it reminded me of a sleeve pattern only with the seam running down the outer edge instead of inside.

So here is the sweater:

I was waiting around until I had solidified my heat transfer colors, Basically, as I explained before, the color of heat transfer dyes as you paint them on your transferring paper is in no way indicative of the end color, so I did loads of testing and loads of combinations and came up with three dye color ratios that produce colors that work in my color range. Here is my desk during this crazy adventure:

So, once I got a color I was happy with, I made this sleeve. The yellow/ orange band is the stretchy bias tape heat transfered with dye:

Meet Old Bessy

2009-03-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

So, after my crit, my advisor suggested I ask the department to supply me a dressform, The thing I have been using is a display dress form made from styrofoam and not something I'm supposed to pin into, so I had to stop using it. So now, I have Old Bessy:

She is in pretty bad shape, and she is older than me! She is a 1984 model! The first thing I did for her was make her some arms. Her new arms are pretty burly because I copied the sleeve pattern from one of my sweaters as a guide, and it was a tad big. The arms are stuffed with the mounds of plastic bags my family sent me way back in sophmore year (thanks Will and Kathy).

Interim Crit #1

2009-03-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

Crit went well. It was really nice to hear what so many other kids in the department are doing. I feel like I'm off to a good start and the feedback I got was basically that I should try to combine the ideas I have about surface treatment and actual garment manipulation and draping, which were things I was planning to do anyways. Here is my stuff up the night before.

Make Friends with the Bargain Loft Lady

2009-03-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

Today, I went to Lorraine's, the local fabric store that has a $1.99/yd Bargain Loft that is constantly raided by risd kids. I went in search of bias tape or something to use on my cut and sew seams as I am now interested in attaching pieces of previously knit fabrics to new fabrics I would make on the knitting machine. Well, at Lorriane's, I chatted with the Bargain Loft Lady, who told me about this amazing stuff that is like bias tap but for use on spandex and swimsuits. Better yet, there was a roll in the bargain loft for 20 cents a yard. Among with some other tests, I snatched some of that up and went to testing on some knit pieces I had made to test inks, but no longer needed. Basically, Bargain Loft Lady saved my day and has put new life into my project. Beyond being awesomely stretchy and cheap, the stretchy bias tape take heat transfer dye really well AND is relatively easy to hook onto the knitting machine to attach new pieces with. Here are some samples I did of attaching the tape to a cut knit piece and then adding a newly knit piece on. I went back the next day and bought another 12 yards of this stuff!

When in a rut, go buy more raw materials?

2009-03-06T20:26:00.001-08:00

So, after talking to my advisor, I went back to get more sweaters. Now that I have a color palette, I am a bit better at only getting pieces that really do work for my project. I also branched out a bit more in terms of construction, as I now will not necessarily be taking every single part of each one apart. Today, I played around with different draping ideas. I wasn't brave enough to experiment cutting them up yet, but that will be happening soon!

Here are some ideas:

Imagine these two images as one

Power of photoshop!

This is utilizing a cardigan I had, using one of the sleeves as a gigantic kangaroo style pocket in front. I tacked on a sleeve just to look at it.

I don't know about this color combo yet, but that is a poncho made for a 4 year old.

This is a normal cardigan I put on upside-down. Now, it has a hood and optional collar.

I'm off to New York tomorrow because I was offered a spare seat on a bus for another department's field trip. I'm excited to look and touch inspiring stuff.

More Sleeves

2009-03-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

I did more testing on sleeves. Some more successful than others, but nevertheless time consuming. First, I heat transfered a solid block of color onto my first victim of the day:

Then I cut out a chunk. They way this sweater was made, the thread were already cut so I wasn't ruining the "one continuous yarn" that is normally the way with knit things.

Here is a piece of that chunk as I knit it back together.

I unraveled the threads one by one and literally tied each thread together. The threads were white or grey and I alternated my pattern of how many of each I would tie together before switching back to the other color.

Here it is on the knitting machine

And here it is back with the original sweater

The effect of the blue looks really nice. The whole tying every row together takes a long time, but I'll just have to throw a "help Lizzy tie string" work party were I feed people in exchange for tying assistance. I also like that I have control of the striping because I can manipulate how much of each yarn there is at any point. I feel like the general essence of the original piece is there.

The other sleeve from today was not so pretty:

I dyed the channels of the cables using some of the dye I made. That worked well and I would do it again.

Then I unraveled that part and knit it back up. It looks ugly and not so special or cool. I am going back to square one with ideas of how to incorporate the idea behind this sweater. I may not be unraveling it at all. I might instead be using sections somehow. We will see, onto a new chapter in the project I guess.

Heat Transfers

2009-03-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

Today, I did a bunch more dye lab, mad scientist style work, but it didn't really look so cool, so no photos from that. However, I also worked on this sleeve:

Using a specific kind of dye, I painted the dye on really cheap, low absorbency paper. I then cut the paper to the shape I wanted, and using a heat press, I transfered the dye from the paper, to the sleeve. The hardest part about this process is that you never know what the transfered outcome color will be. The color of the dye on the paper always looks like the bottom of a paint sink, but then the transfered color ends up being pink somehow. I have to find tune my colors somehow.

Picking my Palette

2009-03-02T20:00:00.000-08:00

Seeing as I am planning to do a lot of dyeing and the base colors of my garments are fairly neutral, I needed a good source for my color palette. I was watching West Side Story at a friends house, and we were all crazy about the colors in the movie. I wanted to pick a movie made in the same general time frame because I wanted it to have been similarly processed. I googled for a while, trying to think of a movie that I thought thematically worked, but also one I would enjoy watching, because I needed to watch it several times. Anyways, I picked a movie, watched it several times, and printed a gigantic poster of screenshots I took of all the times I was interested in the color, or the shape of an outfit someone was wearing. Hopefully, the movie looks familiar.

Then, I looked at my poster and pinpointed the colors which I really felt were important for the movie. I narrowed in on 9 colors, and thus is my color palette.

Moonlighting as a Mad Scientist

2009-02-26T23:08:00.000-08:00

Today, I Dyed. Not even actually, I mixed dye until I simply couldn't anymore. There was way too much I needed to mix.

My cliff-notes version of ratios for mixing different types of dyes

Organizing labeling jars and ready to start mixing

Everything mixed and stored away

The best part about today was the fact that I spent 5 straight hours in the dye lab and didn't get one single headache or even feel faint! This used to happen after less than an hour. But now, I have a fancy respirator than keeps me toxin free. It is also really attractive. Also, you can see where the dye crept up into my gloves:

I also realized after taking the above picture that I forgot to put my favorite thing in the picture of mixed potions. Urea Water! The bin for Urea in the Dya Lab says "Urea: Use Gloves" which, after the teacher explained where the Urea came from, has probably been the most heeded warning in the whole building.

All Systems GO

2009-02-25T23:52:00.000-08:00

So, today I finally had my first meeting with my advisor. I was hesitant to start taking anything apart before talking to her, so I was sort of working on less interesting stuff for a bit. However, my meeting went really well. I showed her my sweaters and my sketches for my plans for each one, and I kind of blew her mind. My project is very experimental, and she is really excited to see if I can get it to work out the way I want to. So without further ado, I took one sleeve off of each of the 5 sweaters I have chosen to work on. I then attached them to a covered, padded board I found:

Also, walking into studio, the first thing I do after setting everything down is make myself a cup of tea (I have a tea kettle, and I bring milk in a koozie). Today, I made Alice laugh because I matched:

The Politics of Textile Silkscreens

2009-02-24T17:30:00.000-08:00

Nothing that I have worked on the past two days looks too exciting. I got the photo shoot pictures printed via adoramapix, which was a great experience and I'll be getting more from them soon. Today, I spent hours searching for my long lost silkscreen. Each textiles major gets a gigantic silkscreen sophomore year. However, no matter how many times you write your name all over it, it's inevitable that if you don't use it, someone else will. Well, last year I lent it to my then senior, now graduated friend, who needed an extra screen. It took me a while to find it, but after tearing off enough layers of tape, I found my name where I wrote it so long ago. I also scurried around & found several screens that belonged to another now graduated kid, so I have a small family of screens to use for the semester. That senior was really mean and obnoxious, so it felt really good to wash out her screens. Tee hee

Finishing Week 1

2009-02-20T17:09:00.000-08:00

I managed to sort through tons of new runway stuff and have really narrowed in on several designers that I want to look at for this project. It's really hard to find designers who specialize in taking big risks in knitting, but Sonia Rykiel can do no wrong. Her latest collection was inspired from a road trip she took from new Mexico to California, and it's beautiful. I also found interesting stuff in Tory Burch and Tuleh's new shows. I put the looks I liked, along with notes about why, which is really crucial actually, in my notebook to show Liz at our first meeting on Monday. Here are the pages I made:

Then I started thinking about the process I was going to use on several of the sweaters that I have. Two of the sweaters are one solid color, but were chosen because they have interesting texture. I've decided to create a pattern through systematically dyeing the pre-existing garments. The below illustrations are supposed to show my proposed dye patterns. The pictures afterwards are close-ups of the two sweaters in question:

Hey, so, if you can't tell, I'm looking into using some form of gold leafing agent on the second sketch. Since then, my mind has been on gold leaf solely. learning about all the forms of application.

The Victims

2009-02-17T22:55:00.000-08:00

Today, I did a 'before" photo shoot for all of the sweaters I have currently to work on, as I was reluctant to touch them before documenting their before state. I even went to the extent of renting a light kit from the awesome media resources people at school. They reminded me of being a tech crew kid back in high school, because they were so honestly interested in my project and their advice was genuinely helpful. I took pictures of the sweaters both flat on the floor and on a model, aka, my friend Saera, Then after the "serious" photo shoot, my friends Emily, Saera, and I each put on our favorite wildly patterned sweater and took a few beauty shots. In case you couldn't tell, the shutter remote is in my hand. We had a lot of fun, and I was really glad to get this done before anyone was actually busy.

Here are the potential Victims for my project:

Not actually my degree project

2009-02-16T23:47:00.000-08:00

I washed all the sweater I have so far to used for my degree project. In the process, I flooded my kitchen because I became really lazy about wringing out all the water in each one before hang drying them.

Then, I worked on this masterpiece. It, in some form will be the poster for our senior show, now 58 days away (I have a count down on my calendar in studio). It was a pain to make, but I'm pretty happy with it. I had to manually choose every row of text. It was a technique I thought about using for my degree project, but it takes sooooo long (this 200 row poster took nearly 9 hours) so that may not happen. Either way, I'm glad I tried it out before designing a grander project around it.

Except, I just realized posting this that our show is APRIL 16th, which would be 4-16. WOW Nothing a little Photoshop can't fix I guess.

Wintersession Final

2009-02-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

Here are the after pictures I promised of my wintersession upholstery class. I had so much fun in this class, and I'm really happy with the results. Also, for the final crit, everyone made accessories to wear from their excess fabric, hence my headband. A few of us also dressed like our chairs. The atmosphere of this class outside of class time was reminiscent of Freshmen year, because we all got along to well and it was a really great way to leave this school.

Anyways, if you don't remember what the chair looked like before, here is a link.

My Thesis Advisor

2009-02-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

All 27 Textiles Seniors handed in their proposals this past week, and I have just been contacted by my advisor: Liz Collins. Honestly, I wasn't too surprised, as my project deals a lot with the actually construction of knits, and she was the only teacher from the 4 planning to advise who specializes in knitting (the others are more printing/ weaving based). The other somewhat exciting thing is that she will only be advising 4 seniors in total this semester.

Besides teaching at risd, Liz also has a knitwear collection that has shown at NY Fashion week, and she still collaborates with other knit designers in New York, including her friend Gary Graham. She went on sabbatical about 2 years ago now and ventured off to Peru to learn more about different regionalized knitting techniques. When I took her advanced machine knitting class last year, she was in the process of synthesizing her ideas into a collection she was working on with Gary Graham. Apparently, the collection is now done, and she is presenting it to us next week sometime.

All in all, she will be a good advisor. She knows tons about the industry and can really help me figure out what I want to do after school. Also, we have the same name.

Fair Isle Knits

2009-02-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

Fair Isle is really common in basic patterned knits. Essentially, two yarns are carried throughout each row of knitting, but only one yarn is knitted in each place on the row. The other yarn passes along the back of the fabric and creates a loop effect on the back side. Here is a picture of the front and back of a Fair Isle Knit.

I want to experiment with printing on sweaters with this construction before de-knitting them. I am hoping that if I print with a light layer of pigment, perhaps through the use of the heat press or a light layer applied through a silkscreen, I can keep the dye from reaching the back layer of floating fibers. This, in affect would preserve the original fair isle design when the garment was de-knitted, as only the parts of each yarn that were on the knitted layer would receive pigment.

Knit De-Knit

2009-02-12T10:50:00.000-08:00

In our Fibers and Dyeing lecture class way back in sophomore year, we learned about a processing technique for yarn known as “Knit De-Knit” in which yarn is knit, washed, and then unraveled, giving the yarn texture. As I will be using pre-knitted fabrics as a materials source, I will explore how to use this feature. I hope to find a few sweaters with interesting knit structure to take apart, as I hope the yarn will continue to hold remnants of it’s previous shape. Something with cables or perhaps tuck stitches would seem to be a good resource.

Here is a picture from a yarn processing plant of a strand of de-knitted yarn:

Sock Dye Blanks

2009-02-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

Here is the basic idea, 2 strands of the same yarn are knitted together into a strip of fabric. This fabric is then dyed in any number of different ways, stripes of color, tie-dyed, or perhaps printed with dye. Then, a knitter will knit one sock from each of the two strands that run throughout the fabric. This ensures a fairly even, symmetrical pattern from one sock to the other.

This picture is from Knit Picks, where they sell the blank pre-knitted fabric for customers to dye themselves:

Wintersession Work

2009-02-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

During our 6 week interim semester, I took a class called "Take that Chair and Stuff it" The basic idea of the class was that each student learned the basics of upholstery by re-inventing an old, beat up, and outdated chair. In addition to the actual upholstery, we also had the option of changing the general design of the chair base. I really took to the project as an interesting way to learn about a practice and allow it to inform the end product. In affect, we learned how to upholster in reverse, by removing layers of fabric off the pre-upholstered furniture. We then used the raw materials from that chair to construct a new piece. The limits of working with a pre existing piece is challenging, as you have to work with what you have, but I also find it to be a comforting guide and inspiration.

This class and the method of working with pre existing pieces is something I wish to continue in my thesis project (hence, why I'm putting it up as my first entry for this blog).

Here is the chair I acquired at the Salvation Army now a bit over a month ago:

My final chair is due on Friday, at which point I will post pictures.