Creative Fabric Project

Today I was in a mini fashion-show-of-a-kind for everyone who participated in a January workshop on creative uses of fabric and patternmaking, so I thought I'd share my final project here. Most of us spent the three-day workshop learning how to make a particular skirt from Tokomo Nakamichi's book Pattern Magic. Nakamichi's pattern-making process was really inspiring to me, particularly in the way that she encourages prototyping sculptural, 3D patterns with paper and then recutting the paper to form new pattern pieces. The skirt pattern we were working from used the same technique as Nakamichi used in this dress, the otoshiana (or "drop-hole").


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So I set out to make a skirt with a drop-hole. I constructed it out of denim, since I needed something sturdy to hold the shape of the skirt and that was the heaviest material I had in my stash. While I've sewn clothing from patterns before, this was the first time that I ever drafted a pattern (given only the dimensions in a book), altered it to fit me, and turned it into a wearable garment. A really good learning experience, I think!

And then...well, the drop-hole in the skirt looked to me liked it needed to have something coming out of it. So I added a speaker cone in the hole, and a pocket to hold a little amplifier circuit, batteries, and an mp3 player. So now I have a skirt that can also play music. (A very, very heavy skirt, because of the weight of the speaker). A bit silly, perhaps, but it was a fun project!