Push/Pull 1 – Cora Hickoff

This project was a great opportunity to become familiar with primary shapes, but also challenge myself to try new sewing techniques. For my first form, I chose a square pattern.

Without performing any alterations, I thought my shape wasn’t interesting enough to look at or hold, so I pinched sections of fabric and hand-stitched them together. It gave the form more life and made it feel bodily. When looking at the shapes in class, my classmates made an interesting point that the exposed thread made the shape feel more delicate–it gave some of them a sense of discomfort because the shape seemed to ask for extra care, and that throwing it around would lead to the threads falling out.

The “surprise” side:

For my second shape, I challenged myself by choosing a sphere pattern (I had only been working with cube patterns so far). Everything was going great with the sewing machine until I realized I’d accidentally sewn the “wrong” sides together. This ended up being a very happy accident. I found the result to be much lovelier and interesting than the shape I would have made had everything gone to plan.

Closeups of some more (happy?) accidents with the sewing machine.

For my last shape, I chose a cone pattern. As a result of my alterations, it ended up looking nothing like that, which was perfectly okay.

In our sewing room, I found a piece of fabric with these mirror sequins, cut them out, and hand sewed them to my shape so that they could play with light.

Though it wasn’t really visible in the final shape, I sewed ruffles into the base of the fabric for the first time. This contributed to the shape looking more spherical than conelike.

Little legs? Appendages? Horns? They can be whatever you want them to be.