User:Camie

0901265@hr.nl / Graphic Design

The old craft assignment is on this page > History of stitching: PROCES

Why am I a maker? (draft)

I’m a maker simply because of my need to give embodiment to what my mind envelopes out of the connection between my thoughts and my environment.

I’m a maker the moment these networks become the voices of the people that surround my work, trying to understand it, grasping at its meaning.

I’m a maker when at the same time I can express that meaning of action, and my work becomes the tool for more to come.

Stitching

Scarf

Fish net scarf

First I wanted to check out weaving. When googling stitching I came onto a youtube tutorial of cardboard weaving, and decided to do that first as an introduction. It was fun, but not that challenging, so I went to the Fabric Station and got a hold of the weaving machine. There I received a document with weaving techniques and studied these, trying all of those techniques in a scarf. Also I decided to experiment with materials, and added the blue thread of a fishing net. It was a very hard, uneasy-to-mingle thread - so I really had to pull tight to get the wires attached.

"Weaving is a method of textile production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. Similar methods are knitting, felting, and braiding or plaiting. The longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft or filling. (Weft or woof is an old English word meaning "that which is woven".[a]) The method in which these threads are inter woven affects the characteristics of the cloth.[1]

Cloth is usually woven on a loom, a device that holds the warp threads in place while filling threads are woven through them. A fabric band which meets this definition of cloth (warp threads with a weft thread winding between) can also be made using other methods, including tablet weaving, back-strap, or other techniques without looms.[2]"'

Workshop

In Brussels we went to a workshop given by Claire Williams. She graduated from ENSAV La Cambre with a master degree in Textile Design and works on personal projects and collaborations with other artists, researchers, hackers and non profit organizations. Involving open source textiles,floss software & hardware, hacked knitting machines, electronic textiles and stories on analogue textile techniques.

She challenged us to use Arduino, a programming code with which she hacked the knitting machine. Later she told us to collect data and put this into an image. I used the amount of data from the DataRoaming I used in Belgium, which was 197 mb and costs me 4,90 ct. I put this into the image with the $$$ and put it into the Arduino.

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Final Artefact

In the workshop with Claire Williams a lot of the tests I did had gone wrong. This because the Arduino glitched my image, orr because I didn’t place the thread right. That also inspired me for my final piece, in which I cooperate graphic posters I made - stack all of them together and in the end knitted the entire image.This was exciting because I didn’t knew what the computer/Arduino would do with it and therefore had no expectations. In the end it came out as an entirely new image, and I found I had unlocked a potential into a set of frames that already existed. An appropration of my own work on a different material, with a different context. A context that I could have never created without the knowledge I learned and received during the practice. I found out that I actually liked knitting like this, instead of doing it with my hands. The part where we hack the machine and repurpose it for something ‘futuristic’ as this really catched my attention. I call it futuristic because it’s an old machine used for modern purposes, something which potential (I believe) is still not fully discovered.

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Why do I make?