Fabricademy Final Project – Textile Waste – Processing Textiles

Posted in Textiles
Fabricademy Final Project – Textile Waste – Processing Textiles

Fabricademy Final Project – Main

Fabricademy Final Project – Textile Waste – Sourcing & Collecting


Laser cutting into Modular design

Based on my design from Week 3: Circular open source fashion – Modular, I decided to see if I could use the smaller waste textile swatches and layer them to create a kind of patchwork.

The idea is that the small pieces would be used up and the modular fabric pieces would interconnect to any length or size, making the created piece two layers thick in all places and no more.

I cut through several layers of fabric, around 6-7 thin pieces, at any one time. To tests this, I would change the power and speed of the laser by cutting circles to start with.

Once the settings were at their best, I moved on to cutting the larger modular pieces.

This modular design is a square and so when laser cutting a piece of fabric, I also realised that I could use the waste fabric scraps that would be left once the square design was cut out.

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Lasercutting into shredded textile waste

Using Rhino, I updated my modular design and incorporated a grid of squares connecting to the outside of the design, so that anything out side of the square would be lasercut into shreds of small squares of 10mm or 15mm sq dimensions.

Sorting out the fabrics into colour tones, allowed me to get shredded and modular pieces in the same colour, as well as separate the shredded waste into colours for design aesthetic reasons ready for added to the bioplastic and textile composite experiments.

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Outcome of the process

Although I like the modular pieces, it became less practical to use. However, the shredded squares were perfect to create colour changes  and a more regular fibre for the bio-binder to attach to.

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