Hands on and Practical

  Lesley Pearce, My mentor and inspiration in education as well as my predecessor as Technology facilitator for the Northern region, yesterday ran a hands on practical workshop for textiles/fashion design technology teachers around new developments/techniques in fabric design.

Aim:

To develop a collaboratively practice

To share knowledge, skills of NCEA programme planning and implementation.

To bring creative practices into textile teaching e.g. thermo printing, e-textiles, designing fabric and so much more.

Lesley in Action

Using Nature as a stimuli for design ideas

Playing with mediums

Lesley's outstanding facilitation skills led us on a journey that allowed the participants to engage and explore with different mediums that were shown on the day. Two things of interest that I personally got from the session and felt I should share with the wider technology community were:

• Thermofax

1. 

   Screen created using basic photocopy machine print

   

   Passed through this machine to create the screen

The following video link explains the process in much more detail.

•      Inktense - Fabric pencils/pastel blocks that are blended with water and then Ironed for colour fastness.
  

  

  Medium used to create following example

  
  

  

  This was the result of my playing around on the day

   Again there is a wealth of instructional videos available on youtube around how to use this medium on fabric. 

The day was a resounding success and to finish off this post I thought I would share a student case study from Lesley's school.

Case Study

"Caitlin, year 13, Rangitoto college student, created this design in minky fabric, (amazingly soft velour type fabric).

Her issue was around mental health issues in teenagers. After much research she wanted to create a weighted blanket that helps people to ground themselves.
Her design came from drawings of a deer’s head. This was scanned to create a jpeg file that allowed her to manipulate colours and backgrounds in photoshop. This was then taken into Spoonflower, an online fabric printing company, where she created the repeat pattern.

 http://www.spoonflower.com/tags/new%20zealand

A weighted blanket: The bed cover is filled with plastic poly pellets similar to those used in Beanie Babies for a heavier feel that creates a natural calming effect in some teenagers and younger children."