Doppelganger – Joseph Paetz

For my doppelganger project, I decided to duplicate the Shop Air blower we have all come to know. I initially wanted to make a scaled up version that was inflated by the blower, then switched to a small inflatable the same size as the blower, and then finally settled on a stuffed version of the blower.

Process

Sue and I worked together to cover the fan in tape and generate the pattern. I initially thought it would be fastest to take pictures of the pattern pieces and trace them in illustrator, but I realized after starting that tracing the patterns directly onto the fabric was much faster.

I chose fabrics that had floral or other intricate patterns to contrast the very utilitarian coloring of the blower (plus I thought they looked nice together). While I was fabricating the piece, I added small strips of muslin across the many rectangular sections that stick off of the main cylinder of the blower. This was to prevent those sections from expanding and losing their shape when stuffing was added. I found that adding these ~1″ wide strips was very quick, but also very effective. The main issue I had during fabrication was sewing on the sheer fabric I chose for the intakes and output of the blower. It was difficult to handle, and the seam on one side of the blower turned out quite messy.

Reflections

Overall, this project was much more complicated than I anticipated. I thought the blower would be easy since it is made up of several basic forms. However, all of those basic forms added up to a lot of pattern pieces. I also realize that I wasted far too much time trying to make a pattern in illustrator. I vastly overestimated how long it would take to trace the patterns by hand, and so sunk a lot of time into illustrator before I tried just tracing them. Despite these difficulties, I am happy with the result. I am especially glad that I decided to go with patterned fabric for most of the piece as I feel like it makes it feel very incongruous next to the real blower.