Note: the original assignment 3 due Feb 4 was cancelled due to the university closure on Jan 31; this new assignment 3 combines the cord and boning elements originally planned as separate assignments.

Due: Mon, Feb. 11, 11:59PM.

We will build upon what we learned through the second assignment: experimenting with gathering & shirring for texture and movement. For this third assignment, we going to incorporate machine stitching and creating channels through which cords or lines can move or boning can be inserted.

The channels we will create are sewn pathways through which we can place other items: lines, cords, and boning or tubes. Channels can be used to create gathered or shirred effects, as well as other effects specific to this techniques, such as gliding along a line.

For this exercise, we would like you to investigate the movement possibilities inherent to fabric with machine stitched channels for line, cord, or boning. 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 machine stitched channels.

As a first step, we recommend the following process: Create a channel or channels in your fabric. Thread a line or lines through your channel and practice manually puppeting the fabric to explore possible motions. Make adjustments to your channels. Puppet the fabric again. Try adding piece of tubing as boning in a channel to see the effects on the movement. 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 the channel(s) and line or cord as needed. Some structures may require more line force that our current winch system can produce; if so, please document the result of hand-puppeting and assess the range of motion and level of force required to help us gauge the needs for additional motion hardware.

 As starting points we suggest exploring the prompts from last week in addition to these prompts:

The key to a compound effect that combines cordage with boning will be balancing the different effects of tension and compression. The boning can be a rigid dowel or a flexible tube or strip, but in either case supports compressive forces applied by the cordage or fabric. The cordage or lines can only support tension forces. We can envision several permutations of how a counterbalance can be built from external lines, internal cordage, internal boning, and gravity:

  1. Expanding and contracting the fabric using the channels with cordage
  2. Sliding along a horizontal line, sliding along a vertical line
  3. Hinge or gather points and lines formed by untensioned fabric between rigid boning
  4. Areas of tensioned fabric counterbalancing preloaded springy boning
  5. Contrasting textures and movements within one piece of fabric

Please document your discoveries and points of interest.

Assignment Specifics

For this exercise, please:

  1. create a fabric sample using several machine stitched channels
  2. include at least one cordage and one boning channel
  3. create two, three or four tendon attachment points for actuation
  4. experiment to find movement points of interest
  5. record a short (no more than a minute) demo video of the effect of the movement (s) using the capstan bench
  6. 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.