When we presented our progress in small groups, I was really fascinated by Charlotte’s object with the strings attached in certain places, pulling the object in interesting ways. I decided to do my own take on it, adding an element of surprise with strings coming out of arbitrary places and pulling at other random places when tugged at. I realized after I had closed the piece that I should have stuffed it less because it made interacting with the object harder when it was fully stuffed, which I took forward to consider when stuffing the last two objects. I also enjoyed the color combination in the end; even though I initially just wanted a rainbow, it looked more vibrant and stood out in the arrangement I ended up with.
This object came about on a whim because I had seen buttons when looking for the zippers and wanted to play around with those. I also cut out the entire circles for my cone in the previous object, so I had a lot of that fabric remaining and wanted to put it to good use. I immediately thought of a book or journal and the button as the clasp keeping it open or closed. I think it would be interesting to have it open to reveal one type of fabric and closed concealing it, but as you can see from the pictures I again stuffed it too much and it had a scrunched up look reminding me of a dumpling with the button holding it together at the top. Though it didn’t end up like a book, I liked the way it turned out when the colored fabric was on the inside and it gave it a unique feel, again allowing people to interact with the object to reveal a new form of it.
When we were going over earlier years’ examples in class, one student’s design that really stood out to me was their object with zippers revealing unique colorful fabrics on the inside. I knew I wanted one of my pieces to be similar in design. I started out with black felt and black zippers to keep the piece as dull and uninteresting to the eye. I then found a rose fluffy fabric in both pink and blue and decided to use these as the surprising pops of color when the zippers opened. I wanted to do this on a sphere object and used the baseball pattern as this was the largest sphere pattern I could find in the precut patterns. This ended up in an interesting shape as it turned into more of a duffel bag shape when opened rather than a larger sphere, which I realized may have been achieved if I used the beach ball pattern instead. However, I still loved how the object turned out and am excited to continue to use zippers to play with the designs of my future inflatables.
When this assignment was first introduced, what immediately came to my mind was the soft, huggable squishmallows often seen in stores. I’ve always wanted one so I thought this assignment would be the perfect excuse to make myself one. I wanted to use interesting fabric finds, so when I found three different textures of pinkish fabrics, it reminded me of a magical creature so I decided to create a unicorn with the cube pattern. I made the cut of white felt much longer than the cube pattern desired so that I could add some gathering (although it didn’t show that much once I put the stuffing in) and I added a golden horn to keep the design abstract but recognizable. I also didn’t stuff the object as fully as some of my others to preserve that squishable, huggable feeling of a stuffed animal.
