8.23.2010

work table : manipulating fabric

One more week before my daughter is back in school. I've only had an hour or two in the studio every day over this summer if I'm lucky. Of course, at the end I find my rhythm. I've come to discover that experimenting has saved me lots of frustration rather than trying to finish a singular piece. I can finish those once school starts. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of sketching and gathering ideas on how to interpret concepts into fabric. Here is this weekend's experiment, folding fabric.



On our mini vacation, I was able to read a lot of my new book, The Art of Manipulating Fabric by Colette Wolff. It is an incredible book with lots of detailed instructions on folding and shaping fabric. I will be trying out many of these, especially in a few weeks when I start a soft sculpture class. I thought I'd start out with creating knife pleats this time. I did a little scaled test piece with paper before starting on fabric.



You end up using A LOT of fabric to do this. I know I'll be doing this in linen eventually and linen can be a pain to work with compared to other fabrics. It is really hard to sacrifice any of my linen to make a scrap sample but I knew it will save me headaches in the long run. I started by creasing the reverse seam lines with an iron and sewed the seams to make a permanent crease.


Next, I pinned the front seams down. This is really hard to do with linen as it always wants to bend in the wrong places. My gridded cutting board was a lifesaver here.


Finally, I hold the folded seams in place by sewing down the edges. Once I figured out the measurements, it was actually pretty easy to do this. I already have in mind what I'm going to use this for and I can't wait to start. Until then, I'll just keep experimenting.

1 comment:

anastasia said...

you have a beautiful and interesting blog here! i have this same book and wonder if i'll ever get to even half of the techniques she covers.

pojagi is very special; the light factors into it in a way that is so different from western quilting, which is more of a refracted light surface. i would like to try my hand at it, hopefully once i've finished the one tiny quilt i have in progress. perhaps irish handkerchief linen would be an interesting textile to use in this process.

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