Playing with textiles methods

I missed yesterday's textiles session, but I learned from everyone that they covered basic weaving, felt-making and knitting. Besides being a terrible knitter, I have plenty of experience with those things so I didn't miss out on new skills.

We started today with a quick look at the "visual language" of textiles (from a fashion point of view). Textiles projects are usually quite 3D but we often need to communicate ideas with 2D methods, like working drawings or fabric designs. We looked at the St. Martin's Fashion Folio to identify what is being show - things like the techniques that will be used, swatches of textures or patterns, and the methods of communicating (photography, collage, etc.)

In textiles, but throughout D&T, we are helping students communicate ideas: using initial sketches and brainstorming; technical and/or working drawings; final designs; presenting the finished item, as drawings or photographs. So we warmed up with some drawing exercises, and thoughts about how to give children a start by providing them with a blank figure to draw onto and how to convey fabric drape and movement.

We tried out a textiles CAD programme called SpeedStep, which was outright winner of most buggy software used to date and I have no reservation in saying I won't be using that version of that programme any time in the future. In theory it functions by working on vectors (lines and points, not pixels) and bitmaps (solid objects, colour fills, patterns) in separate programmes then bringing them together.

For the second half of the day, we got on with looking at and trying out some “smart” materials, and using the heat press for some sublimation processes.