Fabricademy Week 7 : The Textile Scaffold – Textile composites using Vacuum forming

Textile composites using Vacuum forming and Milling

Part 1 – Bio resin made with gelatin

Part 2 – Resin and vacuum

Part 3 – Design and Milling

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Part 1 – Bio resin made with gelatin

Here are the stages we did to create a Gelatin Bioplastic composite.

1. Mix & create the horrid gelatin solution
2. place the fabrics (dry) one by one into the mixture
3. Squeeze out the excess gelatin
4. Layer the fabric pieces one on top of the other, repeating the same process over, until you reach your desired number of layers.
5. Place the layered fabric into plastic, with bleed fabric below to allow this to soak up any moisture
6. place this in the vaacuum machine
7. After 12 hours, remove from the vacuum and keep the fabrics  inside the plastic, but now exposed the composite at the sides to the air,
8. Place the fabric and plastic between two pieces of wood and clamp this together for 24h or more.
9. Under the weight of wood, it will remain flat and dry.
10. Over time the gelatin-fabric composite will lighten in colour, it will harden and the textures of the fabric will be apparent too.

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Part 2 – Resin and vacuum

We also wanted to test a traditional resin that would definitely give us a very hard solid.

1. We used 100ml of resin &  2ml of meta
2. After stirring, we began dipping each piece of fabric in the mixture
3. We then squeezed of any excess and layering the pieces up as in the gelatin test before.
4. We used a fibreglass fabric to wrap the layers in and another foam fabric as the “bleed” fabric.
5. We then put it in the vacuum and left it on auto where it will be for 24h.
6. Afterwards we plan to mill it down and see what happens!
7. Over time, nothing changes with the resin-textile composite.

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Part 3 – Design and Milling

And finally, here are the steps and stages of the milled textile composites

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