Sheer Diversions

Let us discuss fibers for a moment since I've been having rather unsually successful results in my fibers II class, at least when compared to the minor disaster of fibers I.

Way back in October I completed a woven shibori scarf which is where you weave a scarf on a loom with supplemental warp thread (the dark purple strings here).

You can also remove some of the strings as I did here. Small note, this actually began as plain undyed cotton thread, but I dyed everything blue before the next step:

which is to pull all the shibori strings tight to create a resist for dying:

then dye it purple over the blue and start cutting out the shibori strings and open the scarf up.

 



And the final scarf which I liked for its very NES Metroid colors even though I was aiming for more of an SNES F-zero look.

Just to prove it here's a screenshot of Samus arriving in Norfair in the aforementioned Metroid game. The game itself is a long, huge, lonely, and difficult side scrolling trek through an alien planet which I never quite got the hange of since I prefer more shooty arcade like games.

November's project was largely to do devore on a couple of velevet scarfs, devore being an oldish technique to burn out some of the velvet in various patterns leaving open spaces of the silk base fabric. This project we had famous Buffalo buildings assigned to us to go with Runway 6.0's theme of City Bits/ City Bytes and the college's Year of the City thing. What annoys me about Year of the City is that it got more attention than last year's Year of the Arts, but I digress.

The point is I got the Albright Knox Art Gallery, that most Neoclassical of public buildings with the obligatory art museum ugly 1960s additon. I got some very good exterior shots of it at night for inspiration: the middle one reminding me very much of the landmark first person shooter Goldeneye 64.

Of the patterns I created to use for this project, I wound up using one based on the Ionic columns throughout the building seen here on the left velvet sample and another one one based on the folds of the caraytids on the rear exterior of the building.

Here are the rest of my lovely samples of burnt out velvet. I don't know whether I've just improved that much from fibers I to fibers II (my weaving certainly has) but I really liked how well the dying came out on these samples. Though like the woven shibori project my samples came out a bit better than the actual finals.

This is one of them, which I still like even though it was supposed to turn out more like the top left sample in the group of nine above. My other scarf was supposed to look like the pink sample to the left of the image but as you can tell below:

It didnt. Instead of scarlet with stripes of a color that can only be described as mulberry, I wound up with scarlet and nothing else until I freaked out, scrunched it up, and dunked in black dye for a half hour and got this. I'm still rather lukewarm about it but I didn't want to mess it up even further, and thankfully the professor seemed to like it as is.

While I meditate on what to do for the deconstructive screen printing process that is the next assignment here's today's musical interlude. I considered posting the background music to Norfair but it's one of the more boring songs from Metroid's bass heavy soundtrack when there are better tunes like this one. I also was going to post the classic Goldeneye Gets Down video (caused by the crooked cartridge trick) until I discovered its audio had been taken out by copyright claim.

So I am left with the excellent soundtrack ripped straight from the Cosmic Wars, a real time stategy space sim that never made it out of Japan. I tried playing it once but was immediately bored by the fact it is an RTS game. But it is made by Konami, a company know for having some great sound tracks and this one s quite nice to listen to.