The Worlds We Create
Silence is…
This piece combines illustration, hand embroidery, shibori dying techniques, and screen printing on cotton. The concept started with the phrase: Silence is. I contemplated what silence was to me and I found that recently in my life, silence was something sort of missed. In school, there’s always schedules, classes, assignments, and obligations that take up my headspace resulting in a never-ending torrent of thoughts, images, videos, and lectures. Silence is something that Western society is uncomfortable with - we feel compelled to fill it with conversation. Long pauses are awkward. We can’t look idle. At least that’s the general narrative around silence. I wanted to shed light on that idea that felt so commonplace yet wrong to me. And from it came an illustrative fabric piece that visualizes what we may push away from ourselves when we envelope ourselves in a bubble of notifications, messages, and screens.
Ideation
It started with some thumbnail sketches…
Testing out some color palettes.
Let’s Start the Shibori
Shibori dying techniques come from a rich Japanese history of fabric dying. The process includes tying, folding, and sewing together a piece of fabric to limit the surface area of fabric exposed in the dye bath. After properly bound, the cloth is left to soak in the dye bath for the desired amount of time to get the intended color. Within this project, I only barely scratched the surface of what is possible and what has been done through this dying technique. If you want to learn more about Shibori I encourage you to do some more research - you wont be disappointed.
These images depict the zig zag pattern I utilized to bind the cloth. The right is the pattern laid flat, and the left shows the scrunches and folds that begin to form when I pull it more taut.
On the left, if you look closely, the white thread pattern shown in the previous pictures shows three lines of the zig zag pattern on the full fabric piece. The right image is what the fabric looked like after I tightened the threads and scrunched it up fully.
Time for some color!
Tada! The pattern is meant to abstractly resemble clouds in the sky with the pale blue color as the background color.
On a separate piece of fabric, i began the screen-printed design in the middle utilizing contact paper to screen out unwanted ink and create a stencil.
The screen printing continues! In the left image, I began the hand embroidery on the notification icons.
With the embroidery done, I cut out what would become the center panel that I sewed to the blue cotton sheet I dyed before.
Final Embroidery + Embellishments
Above: I drew the embroidery flowers in washable ink.
Below: Some process images of the embroidery. Techniques included running stitches, chain stitches, satin stitches, woven roses, and french knots.
After attaching the center panel to the background cloth and finishing the surrounding embroidery foliage, The Worlds We Create was finished. Detail images below.
