I’ve been busy over the winter: pushing ever onward with surface finishes on the white wool-covered ‘Hanging Pods’, designing and stitching industrial felt ‘Holdable’ sculptures, hosting an Open Studio event, carving the last of the twelve Hanging Pods, planning the fabrication of the metal structure that will suspend the hanging sculptures, and working on some of the smaller-scale, more sellable work: wool drawings and a unicorn fetal specimen. Click on each image below for a bit more of an explanation.
Getting Down to Work: my process of patterning, cutting, and stitching felt for large-scale sculpture
Now that my space is set up enough I'm finally getting some work done on my InTouch project. I've made a lot of tiny test pieces to work out the pattern pieces for the most basic forms, and I've been learning along the way that human error makes for some interesting effects. As much as I draw and test and print out and trace and cut patterns, there's still a lot of variability that comes from, ya know, being a human as I stitch.
Reexamining small models I made to figure out plans for larger pieces. The twisted piece I'm holding didn't start out that way-- the twist came about from the directionality as I sewed the pattern pieces together. But I like it, so I'm going to recreate the effect in the full-size version.
After ironing the freezer-paper pattern onto 3/8" thick wool,I cut out each piece. Yes, my studio is very cold in the winter.
To go from idea to large-scale piece, I start by making a small felt pattern and stitch it together, trimming, changing, and restitching until I like it. Then I take it apart, trace the felt pattern onto paper, and scan the drawings. Then I digitally trace over the pattern using Adobe Illustrator, scale it up, and print it out. I use the light table to trace the pattern onto freezer paper, which will adhere temporarily to felt when I iron it on.
Stitching together the large pieces. The bumps you see will actually end up as indentations in the sculpture.