Evaluation Report

The reason that I choose textile innovation at the beginning is because i'm a textile student. Along with personal studio work, I think I need more academic and theoretical knowledge to help me to understand more about the textile and fashion industry. Also as English is not my first language, I thinking attending these lectures will really help me gaining textile related vocabulary, and it really did help a lot. 

Throughout the lectures about Textile Innovation, I learned many things, not only about language but also about textile and fashion. From the first lecture, we learned textile application in daily life, the construction of fabric and different types of commercial fibre resources. This lecture inspired me to research about natural fibre art, which I found I'm really interested in a Japanese artist's work, Makiko Wakisaka. The research about her is in my previous blog. On the second lecture, we learned about the non-traditional fibre sources, which is really my most interested part, I always like paper art and 3D structure fabric. So after this lecture I searched about 3D textile which I found Matières Ouvertes , is a French design studio specializing in 3D textiles. Although mainly of there works are woven fabric and I'm a stitcher, while their technique that applying rubber, wire, pvc, ect. Those unusual materials into weaving did inspire me a lot. And the 3D structure that these materials form in textiles is just amazing. Along with the following lectures, I learned Textile industry and sustainability and functionality of textiles. And finally, during this unit, I found a material, which I really interested to, that is Silicone. When I research about unusual textile material application, I found a designer - Tzuri Gueta. He worked with silicone to create beautiful jewelry with strong texture. As a starting point, I research more deeply about silicone, this material itself. And I found that, nowadays silicone appears everywhere in our daily life from automotive to cookware, from dry-clean to cloth coating. There are really some company developing and producing fabric, which coated by silicone, because of the waterproof and heat resistant properties. While with my personal experiment of the silicone, I tried to apply it onto fabric, and it did create really interesting texture, but the smell of this material is discussing, although its not toxic at all. May be is the type of silicone that I choose, so I need to do more research about this material.

After this Territories of Practice Unit, the great improvement for me is when I am researching or looking at a piece of textile, I may not just think I look really nice, I will also think about the properties and functions of this piece of fabric. Can it apply directly on human body? Is it waterproof? Will it be very expensive to produce? What the raw material and where can I get it? All this questions really help with my further career as a textile student and a stitcher. Also recording notes, and research in this blog is also very helpful for my study. We I am free at home I like to research about contemporary textile design and fashion design, but I usually just look at the website and next time when I want to reference something that I had read before, it just so difficult to find in. While writing this blog helps me to gathered, recorded and cleared up all the information that I got during the this period. So I feel really satisfy with writing down all the noted of those lectures, which really helped me to understand more about the contents.

Overall, thanks to Miss Ros Hibbert who's a such lovely teacher, provided really helpful lectures to us, and let us know more about the textile industry. And I will try to use what I learned from those lectures as many as I can in my further study of textile design.