Push/Pull Part 1 – Julia Nishizaki
When approaching this project, I knew that I wanted to experiment with some of the manipulations Olivia showed us in class, such as enlarging patterns and adding in holes. I wanted to create colorful, fun, playful, and huggable objects, like stuffed toys of some sort, so I chose to stick with the bright, solid-colored fleece as my only material. Some of the challenges I faced at the beginning of this project were that I wasn’t very familiar with sewing machines, as most of my previous sewing projects were based in hand-sewing, and I was also unfamiliar with how a moderately thick fabric, like the fleece, would lay with pleating, and how to sew over multiple thick layers with the machine.
Object 1:
With my first push-pull object, I wanted to play with enlarging the pattern of a primary shape. Starting with a cylinder, I cut the rectangular piece into three sections, and cut each of those three sections into strips so that the final form could bulge out in three different ways at three different places. While the fleece ended up being easier to sew than what I expected, I found it very difficult to sew on curved paths, so the two ends of the cylinder ended up looking lopsided, rather than perfectly circular. With this first form, I was also very surprised at how much stuffing I could put inside, and how round the object would become. Adding stuffing also helped to smooth out any wrinkles caused by small mistakes or squiggly sewing lines. After stuffing the object, I felt that for such a large form, its sides were fairly empty, so I experimented with using zig-zagging, external threads to compress the form.
Obejct 2:
For my second object, I decided to start with a cube. My main goal was to create a hole that would go all the way through the form. While I had noticed the effects of the stuffing in the first object, this second object emphasized the poly-fil’s ability to fully fill out a form, as small details like the corners on the cube, or the asymmetrical outline of the “hole,” were lost due to the amount of stuffing. In the end, the object looked more like a donut, and the opening was barely visible. From an experimental standpoint, I was really fascinated by how different this final form looked compared to the image I had in my mind, especially as I had to gather some of the fabric around the hole to make the fabric match up.
Obejct 3:
By the third object, I was fairly comfortable with fleece as a material, as well as moderately comfortable with using the sewing machine. For this final form, I chose to manipulate the object’s sides by sewing along random, organic paths, rather than at a consistent 5/8ths seam allowance. Thus, the sides of the form ended up concaving at certain points and protruding at others. I also wanted to add in small details like the yellow button sewn with red thread, or the colorful scraps of fabric sewn into the seams, to emphasize the playful tone of the object. Although this pattern started off as a cone, I purposely wanted to approach this last object from a more exploratory perspective, and didn’t plan it out as much as my others. Thus, the final form appeared more organic, like an imaginary creature.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project, and was surprised by the degree to which randomly expanding patterns or adding baffling could change an object, while still allowing each object to appear somewhat polished and cohesive. In the future, if I were to create more forms, I would like to explore more with the materials I used, such as using thinner outer fabric like muslin to express finer details, or using trash bags for stuffing, rather than poly-fil, to bring in a sound element and create a different user interaction. In addition, I stayed fairly true to the process of taking the pattern of a singular form, manipulating it, and sewing the different pieces together. It would be interesting to play more with warping the dimensions of each form, and with combining multiple primary shapes to create more complex and open-ended objects.