Since there was no such an opportunity for checking our improvements through this whole semester during class, this independent project was a great chance to see what I have learned from each assignment for me.

The image above is the selection of  geometric shapes that I created for the project. I wanted to create them as the warm-up activity before heading to complicated forms. However, the endless repetition of geometric shapes was really challenging for fabric. Since every corner and edge should be sewed perfectly for the complicated forms, I kept failing to complete forms that have more than 10 sides. Therefore, I changed the goal of this independent project for exploring simple three dimensional geometric forms with different types of fabric.

With many differences, I did enjoy the experience of making geometric shapes with different types of fabric that we have used in class. I really liked how all the geometric shapes in soft forms feel like a sphere ball without any sharp edges and corners. I would love to explore the simple geometric forms in various types of fabric such as cotton, silk, velvet, canvas, denim, and hard paper. For hard paper and canvas, I would like to challenge some complicated forms that I failed for this project, since they have hard surfaces to easily create sharp edges and corners.

The goal of this assignment was to learn how to make patterns from a pre-existing object and replicate it in a soft form. For this assignment, I chose to recreate my portable mouse in a soft form because I wanted to make a replication of an object that I use everyday.

At the beginning, I thought it would be much easier than the last assignment since we are making it with fabric in a smaller scale. Therefore, I did not have any concerns when I chose a mouse as my object. It was quite small but I thought I can absolutely handle that. Also, because I was very familiar with creating own patterns from the experience of the second assignment, I easily created patterns of a mouse without any consideration. I quickly realised that I was wrong when I started to pin patterns together. I also did pin on my hand many times and did make many mistakes while sewing. Because this assignment is making a three dimensional object and particularly my object has many arc shapes, patterns do not fit perfectly together and it was also a big problem for this assignment. When I eventually finished with making it, I was not satisfied and there were many parts that I did not like. In particular, some important concave and arc shapes for hands were missed. I carefully sewed for making those shapes but what came out was greatly different from what I expected.

From this assignment, I learned how to create patterns of an object in a very effective way. Next time, I would like to replicate my mouse in a larger scale in order to make many features that I missed and skipped due to their hardness to be done.

Because John and I chose to come up with our own patterns inspired by the book, we did not have to enlarge the patterns. Instead, we did draw our patterns on ripstop nylon directly. It was much easier and quicker to start cutting out patterns without the enlarging process. However, soon, It was really hard to guess the size of each part. Therefore, after each cut, we compare them together and cut some if they don’t belong together. For this hybrid assignment, we focused a lot more on the bunny form and included features of the ram in smaller ways. Because we were creating a large hybrid of an animal, we thought it is important to simplify some parts. Therefore, we only included horns and darker legs for illustrating as a ram.

Since this was our first time sewing something this big, both John and I could develop our sewing skills more and learned a lot from this project. We felt that it is actually harder for sewing larger pieces together than smaller pieces. By the end of the project, both of us became much familiar with the sewing machine, especially connecting two parts together. For horns, however, sewing lines on the nylon before putting them together did not work since the horns are too big compared to the thin lines.

If we had more time, we would have added more details to the body. Especially, we would have put more sewing lines to create subtle indents similar to the actual horns. The final result was great but there are some body parts that we need to work more on.

What we might have done differently is make the patterns of the main body smaller and narrower, so the result would be more cohesive. We would have to be more careful concerning the measurements of the patterns in order to avoid making them unbalanced. Also, we might put the legs more front, so the hybrid can sit down as we want it to do.