ALUMINIUM SKIRT
○ 4 DAYS
○ FREE THEMED PROJECT
○ "TO CHALLENGE ONES SKILLS"
○ Full access to the engineering facilities of HU Utrecht University for a week felt like a unique opportunity to develop a creative/strange project using materials only their machines could easily manipulate.
○ Dress making is a skill I like to develop on my leisure time. However, this project came as a great chance to combine both aspects in an unusual way.
○ The process started with some brown paper pattern designing. ○ First, in small scale to design the cone shape.
○ Afterwards, I did it in real scale to calculate the length possibilities of the skirt with the material I had (2 aluminium layers of 100 X 60 cm).
○ Transferring the design to a digital vector program in real size and defining the lines where the water jet machine would cut the aluminium.
○ The main difficulty of the cutting process lied in the need to flip the material over as it was bigger than the cutting area of the machine. A big planning and extreme accuracy on the procedure was successfully carried out to have a clean cut.
○ Finally, the two sides that would be the "back" part was riveted and the "front" part of the skirt were joined by embedding 5 buttons into the aluminium sheets to allow the carrier of the garment to untie it and wear it multiple times.