jhewitt@andrew.cmu.edu – Inflatables and Soft Sculpture https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a 99-361 - Spring 2018 Tue, 08 Jan 2019 14:12:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.21 https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/cropped-CMU-inflatables-S18-web-image2-5-32x32.jpg jhewitt@andrew.cmu.edu – Inflatables and Soft Sculpture https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a 32 32 John independent project https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/698-2/ Fri, 18 May 2018 02:39:52 +0000 https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/?p=698 My initial idea was to create a puppet similar to that of the muppets but quickly after I started sewing I decided to switch to created stuffed ‘animals’ instead. This way I felt comfortable in creating more than one item and I could focus more on the sewing aspects of the project.

Here are a bunch of sketches of ideas:

Here are the rough final sketches:

Part of the process:

The final result:

 

For the bluemonster, soon after I began I recognized similarities between it and ugly dolls which I remember being popular as a child. For the nose, I first used tape to create a shape, then pinned on to that a striped fabric I made then hand sewed it shut. All facial feature like the mouth eyes and nose were also hand sewed on. If I could change anything  about it  now I would add filling to the limbs and maybe add weights or magnets to them. I was very happy my strategy with the teeth sewn onto the mouth looked cute.

I think that the duck came out looking more professional than the first one. I though it looked very tim burton like. The look was cleaner and played with more things rather than the monster which was somewhat simpler. It came out a lot different than the sketch of it looked because when I made the head circular originally I was upset with the look. I decided to separate the body I had made into two to get the fun cylindrical shape for the head and body. The neck process was similar to the nose for the monster, but longer, I sewed tubes together to make a long cloth and then brought the sides together, this was machine sewn. I added wire in the neck and  the wings to let the duck be posable but with more time and thought I would have added something for the wire to attack to inside the ducks body so that it wasn’t freely moving. I was very happy with the final result though and plan on doing projects like these again.

]]> Doppleganger John https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/doppleganger-john/ Thu, 15 Mar 2018 22:17:30 +0000 https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/?p=549 I chose to replicate my left hand for this assignment.

Although I was happy to move back to fabric after the large inflatable, I quickly remembered that sewing on a small scale is just as hard.

I was fortunate that, when I cut the tape off my hand, most of the pieces were able to lie flat without help. I did cut some darts in the fingers, but when it came time to sew, I ignored them for the most part as the fabric curved by itself when stuffed. Because of all the small pieces I realized that I would have to figure out the order that I would sew them in first, I decided to use the machine for the less technical parts, i.e. the fingers, and I hand stitched the final steps that connected the back of the hand to the front at the thumb.

When I finished I thought it looked better to not sew the hand closed, as if there was a body that the hand should be sewed on to. Overall, I was really happy with how colorful it turned out. It felt very whimsical and I thought that it would be fun to make an arm for it. I hand sewed the arm to the hand very randomly, and played with the stuffing to make it look like the hand was close to falling off.

If I was going to redo this assignment, I would use the monochromatic theme we discussed in class and try for a neater, more accurate version of my hand. This assignment was really fun to sew and the patterns make it feel alive to me, but I would be interested in a more serious version of it.

 

]]> Assignment 2 – Rachel and John https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/assignment-2-rachel-and-john/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 19:19:12 +0000 https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/99-361/s2018a/?p=432 Rachel and I picked a rabbit and a ram to morph together. Initially, we had trouble figuring out how to cut the patterns for each animal and combine them, so we chose instead to come up with our own patterns inspired by the book. We focused a lot more on the rabbits form for the head, and included features of the ram in smaller ways. Because we were creating a stuffed animal, we felt that a more comical approach towards the features (i.e. small horns and a chubby torso) would be better suited for this project. We imagined an animal we would have had as children.

Since this was our first time sewing something, both Rachel and I learned a lot from this project. Both of us became familiar with the sewing machine and how to sew by hand. We also learned how to embroider, which came out looking really nice. We experimented with the horns by sewing lines on the fabric before putting them together which added subtle indents similar to that of actual horns.

If we had more time, we would have added more detail to the body. The final result was great but I was anxious as to what the animal would look like before I attached the head. To go further we could have added palms or put some of the fur from the body on top of the head.

What we might have done differently is use a single pattern for the back of the body and the head, so the result would be more cohesive. this would be more challenging as rather than create the main parts separately we would have to do the majority of the work on one part. I think that we would have to be more careful concerning the measurements of the patterns but the result would look very interesting.

(accidentally deleted this)

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