New Textiles 2012

Nonwoven

experiments with latex and silicone casting

For this week’s assignment I decided to try out several experiments with the latex and silicone as tools for making non woven textiles. The first thing I made is a simple rectangular piece with an LED embedded inside. I used conductive tape for the two ends of the LED and cast it inside the silicone. [...]

controlled surface deformation (with magnets)

Last year, I experimented with embedding small spherical magnets in an elastic fabric in order to simulate a controlled surface deformation: With this assignment, I wanted to recreate a similar effect by embedding the magnets in silicone. First I made a mold by laser cutting plexi and stacking it to get the inverse of what [...]

Felted LED plate

For the nonwoven textile project, I tested felting wool roving with aluminum wool as conductive material. In this quick test, I soldered a small LED to a crimp-beaded aluminum wool. It seems to light up and work! I liked the fact that everything can be felted into one material/surface; no need for stitching conductive thread, [...]

Starry Night

One of my favorite painting is Van Gogh’s Starry Night as evidenced through the pictures below. I wanted to recreate an abstract version of this painting using silicon and optic fibers. I first built a molt using Legos, I left holes where fiber optics should go. I then cut up several fiber optics pieces and scored cuts [...]

Micro (really mili) Fluidic Device

Micro fluidic devices are an emerging topic in Mechanical Engineering and have many applications in chemistry, biology, and medicine. The goal of this project was to create a larger micro fluidic device from silicone to demonstrate some of the properties of low Reynolds number flows  without a microscope. A few mili fluidic devices I made in 2.674 are [...]

Some experimants

Thermochromatic Grid I colored thread with thermochromatic ink (just dipped it in a cup with some liquid color). After it dried I used the bumps of the Lego bricks of the walls of the mold to create a grid with two layers of thread. The original idea was to put current on the tread but [...]

Composite Variations

This week I made three composite textiles using a duplication polymer that is mostly used in dentistry. I also use this polymer to make many of the samples I use in my research, so I thought it would be fun to use it in new and experimental ways.

Candied Silicone

For my nonwoven project, I wanted to play with casting solid materials in silicone, so I decided to cast different candies in the form of jewelry. At first I was not sure what kind of reaction silicone would have to sugars but it turned out that the silicone cured well around the sugary delectables. I chose [...]

Wallicon.

This week, since I had never caste silicon, I decided to focus my project on learning the basics of casting. However, as with all of my projects, I wanted to ensure that there was seme functional purpose to me efforts. Introducing the Walicon — A Wallet Made of Silicon. In addition to making a function [...]

Giacomo Balla’s Stained Glass Window

This week our assignment was to “Make a piece of flexible non-woven fabric at least 6″x6″ (~15cm x 15cm) with some noteworthy characteristic. (An unusual blend of materials, interesting structural characteristics, embedded circuitry, special electrical properties …?)” We were given a tutorial on casting latex rubber and silicone. I practiced using the latex rubber and [...]