Friday Fibers Roundup

February 10, 2017

This week’s Friday Fibers Roundup features bacteria-dyed silk scarves, knitted ramen noodles, and a list of innovative new materials for designers to keep an eye out for.

---

1) The Sari Project, created by Malika Verma Kashyap (owner of Bangalore-based creative agency Border & Fall), is a series of three short films on the sari’s past, present, and future, featuring a complete anthology on how-to drape India’s sari in 84 ways.

2) Textile expert Stephen Szczepanek and owner of Sri (a textile gallery in Brooklyn, NY) shares his knowledge about the remarkable recycling practices of boro with Cooper Hewitt in occasion with their exhibition Scraps, Fashion, Textiles, and Creative Reuse (on display until April 16th, 2017).

3) Fastco Design recently published a list of “11 Exciting New Materials Designers Should Watch” and quite a few spots on that list belong to innovative fibers and textile-related materials.

4) Jeffrey Gibson’s work blends traditional and contemporary elements to powerfully comment on the treatment of Native Americans in series of punching bags, sculptures, and paintings. Having a Choctaw and Cherokee background, as well as living in the US, Germany, Korea, and England, Gibson brings his diverse experiences to his profound work.

5) Created by folding each scarf until it fits inside of a petri dish, Studio Natsai Audrey, an experimental bio-design firm, created a colorful line of silk scarves individually dyed by bacterial colonies as part of an ongoing series of investigations called Faber Futures (via The Creators Project).

6) In this video, a man is dealing with the dangerous levels of smog in China by transforming $700 sneakers into masks.

7) The exhibition, Lenka Clayton: Object Temporarily Removed opens at the Fabric Workshop and Museum on February 10th, 2017 and is on display until July 9, 2017.

8) Singapore-based artist, Cynthia Delaney Suwito uses ramen noodles to knit scarf-like tapestries as well as archeological-like noodle finds (via Vice).

9) Firewall, a collaborative, interactive installation by Aaron Sherwood and Michael Allison, features a taut membrane of spandex in which various lights are projected onto it as it responds to touch (via Colossal).

10) Rescued elephants in Northern India are being knitted sweaters in order to keep them warm. Each sweater takes about four weeks to knit and are created by staff and volunteers from the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center (via Indiatimes).