17/08/2009

The sequinned chair

- a double weave with pockets including sequins


The chair itself is a sister to the one with text - all four sisters can be seen here.

So: the fabric was meant for upholstery, with pockets including glittering objects (in this case ordinary plastic sequins). Thus, the base cloth had to be "the same" in the pocket areas as in the plain areas - which made me do the pockets with a supplementary warp/weft.

I wanted to create a structure that showed the stitching of the supplementary threads as little as possible on the face of the cloth. To see the result better I chose to use different colours for the pocket warps/wefts. The sample and detail pictures shows that the construction worked fairly well.

When wet finishing the sample I learned that plastic sequins do not like a hot wash – they loose their sparkle. They also do not like a hot press – they get flat and sticky enough to adhere to the fabric.

The final cloth was wet finished at a lower temperature, and was mangled rather than pressed.

Note: I often use several colours when constructing a weave just to make it easier to see the structure(s).

Below is the draft, and a picture of the sample.


2 comments:

Laura Fry said...

The chair looks great - what fun sequins you found! I especially like the leaf (or is that a tear drop?)

Cheers,
Laura

Kerstin på Spinnhuset said...

Well - it was one of a bag of so called "assorted" ones (which I take to mean "just random"). Finding bigger packages of big, "round" and preferrably silver coloured sequins proved impossible - in fact, I had to go to London to find a big enough supply of the gold ones I used...

Kerstin