Push/Pull 1 – Kevin Thies

 

Push/Pull overall ended up being a challenge in craft and skill. By the end of the pieces, I had become a lot more confident in my abilities to work from and modify a pattern, as well as comfort on a sewing machine, and especially figuring out some of the quirks of the Brother machines.

My first piece was inspired by a shiny green fabric I had a lot of that was obnoxiously shiny and colorful, but I found another really shiny fabric and they worked well together. I decided to challenge myself to make more of a true cube instead of a puffy cube, and to append a rounded cone to the corner of a cube. Cutting the corner off of a finished cube was a big leap, and I was worried that something would go wrong, even if I did the measurements a few times. Pinning the corner did end up taking a lot of time to figure out, but in the end everything was sized perfectly, and the resulting hole in the cube was around my headband size, so I could wear it as a hat! The button tufting-like process was achieved by running string across the project, holding down washers. In the end, if I had buttons, I would have opted for those instead, as the washers didn’t hold all that well.

For this shape, I was inspired by a 20-sided dice, and decided to go for that shape, but to have it open up colorfully on one end. If anything, the process was more tedious than difficult, as every piece was from the exact same patterned triangle. However, in doing this piece, I got really good at sewing triangles together and it built up my competency. Going off of the last project, this one uses a button that goes through the the back, and when pulled, the five flanges close up like an alien mouth. Choosing the fabrics for different parts was a joy, and the simple muslin really draws the eye to the brighter, flashier colors.

In my manipulation proposals, I suggested fun things to stuff a project with, and at this point I had only practically used stuffing. As a class we had just run out of the stuff, which became a good reason to try out something weird. I decided that an umbrella is an object that can expand to fill space, so I’d try to make a shape that goes well with that. A triangle-base pyramid is sort of like an umbrella, since it has the long axis like the handle, and then splays out at the bottom. I modified the pattern to really pull in at the tip, and when it was all put together, the geometry of the umbrella handle really stuck out against the tip of the pyramid, and because the shape wasn’t completely stuffed, it was interesting to see how much of the shape was the umbrella and how much was the patterned pyramid. In the end, both forms showed themselves off quite well.