Due: Mon, Jan. 28, 11:59PM.

Our first assignment focused upon moving a basic piece of cloth using hand-puppetry and the capstan bench. This second assignment will build upon that exercise with an additional dimension: piercing the cloth with thread to change its range of possible motions and textures.

Gathering and shirring are two similar forms of traditional textile manipulation. Gathering converts the edge of a piece of fabric into mini-folds bunched together. Shirring is creating by gathering multiple areas of fabric over larger portions of the cloth. In contrast to the gathered or shirred areas, the untouched areas of cloth erupt into irregular, rolling folds or drapes. The gathered or shirred areas take on a stiffness and the unstitched areas a fluidity.

In addition to changing the quality of the cloth itself, the gathered and shirred areas become a path for potential movement. If a gathered or shirred area is constructed in an impermanent way, the cloth might also expand or contract along the stitched lines. Gathering and shirring can be done by hand or by machine stitching.

For this exercise, we would like you to investigate the movement possibilities inherent to gathering or shirring the fabric. Your choice of cloth material will affect how the stitched and bunched areas will behave, both by themselves and in contrast to non-stitched areas. We would like you to restrict yourself to working with one piece of fabric at a time and to using only hand stitching.

As a first step, we recommend the following process: Create some gathered or shirred elements in your fabric. Then attach lines to your fabric and practice manually puppeting the fabric to explore possible motions. Make adjustments to your gathered or shirred areas. Puppet the fabric again. Work back and forth between puppeting and adjusting your fabric. Move to the capstan bench and see what is possible there using the winches and counterweights. Adjust shirring or gathering as needed.  As starting points we suggest exploring the prompts from last week in addition to these new prompts:

  1. Tensed areas and fluid areas of the fabric and their range of movements
  2. Expanding and contracting the fabric using shirred or gathered lines
  3. Folding and rolling the fabric
  4. Contrasting textures and movements within one piece of fabric

Document your discoveries and points of interest.

Assignment Specifics

For this exercise, please:

  1. create a fabric sample using gathering and/or shirring techniques
  2. create two, three or four tendon attachment points for actuation
  3. experiment to find movement points of interest
  4. record a short (no more than a minute) demo video of the effect of the movement (s) using the capstan bench
  5. post a short blog entry with the video and a paragraph or two explaining your explorations.

Deliverables

To be uploaded as a post to the course blog:

  1. A brief paragraph outlining your explorations: intended effect, surprises, discoveries, successes.
  2. Short video clip (no more than a minute). Please shoot from a stable camera, not handheld; we have tripods and Magic Arms available at Lending, or you may use a laptop resting on a table. Please embed the video so it can be directly viewed; you may either upload an MP4 file to our server (up to 16 MB) or use supported third-party hosting. N.B. hosted .mov files cannot be embedded; please convert to MP4.

We will review your posts prior to class and select one or more to discuss at the start of our next class.

Grading rubric.

When you go to run the hardware, the exercise 1 lab notes will help.