Thursday, 8 December 2011
Plants to Products
Plants to Products
Experimenting with the bamboo sheath. I have knitted toegther this wool loosely and attached the bamboo sheaths to it. 
Plants to Products
Sheaths sewn together.
Sheaths boilerd and moulded around this sandwich box, once dried PVA glued ontop. 
Finshed Box dried
Plants to Products
This is our latest project, but the first that I have blogged about. I thought it would be good to keep a record of it so I can see easily my work as it progresses. Also, its a bit of a motivayion to keep going on it and adding more things.
So the brief was to choose a plant based material and change this into a product. The course at Falmouth is a lot to do with sustainability so a lot of our projects are like this.
I chose Bamboo at first to research. There is a massive plantation of Bamboo at the bottom of our campus so I was able to take a few shoots back to the studio to play with. Once I got back to the studio, I strip the bamboo so it was threaded and was thinking of doing something with the threads. I aslo baked the bamboo shoots, boiled them and looked at the properties before and after.
When boiling the bamboo, I also boiled the sheaths with them and I found that at first when stripping them from the bamboo, they were brittle and easy to crack and brake in half, but once boiled, they were soft and pliable to twist and roll. I did this with a few of the bamboo sheaths and found that if I kept them in the desired shape by tying or holding something on top of them, after 24 hours or less they held this shape well, without unraveling, but they became brittle again. I also did some weaving with the sheaths and moulded it into a sandwich box and left for 24hours to harden again.
I also laser cut patterns into the sheaths and this worked really well.
Pictures to follow....
So the brief was to choose a plant based material and change this into a product. The course at Falmouth is a lot to do with sustainability so a lot of our projects are like this.
I chose Bamboo at first to research. There is a massive plantation of Bamboo at the bottom of our campus so I was able to take a few shoots back to the studio to play with. Once I got back to the studio, I strip the bamboo so it was threaded and was thinking of doing something with the threads. I aslo baked the bamboo shoots, boiled them and looked at the properties before and after.
When boiling the bamboo, I also boiled the sheaths with them and I found that at first when stripping them from the bamboo, they were brittle and easy to crack and brake in half, but once boiled, they were soft and pliable to twist and roll. I did this with a few of the bamboo sheaths and found that if I kept them in the desired shape by tying or holding something on top of them, after 24 hours or less they held this shape well, without unraveling, but they became brittle again. I also did some weaving with the sheaths and moulded it into a sandwich box and left for 24hours to harden again.
I also laser cut patterns into the sheaths and this worked really well.
Pictures to follow....
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