USITT Fabric Modification Symposium - Day 2!

[labricoleuse]

Today was the second day of the symposium; while we waited for our output from yesterday's classes to cure/dry/etc., we toured three companies and organizations in the Carolina piedmont whose work is of related interest to costume professionals.


The first stop of the day was a non-profit development and consultancy company called [TC]2. They do a huge range of research and development of technology for the apparel and textile industries. One of their ongoing projects is body-scanners and related software. They market it in a variety of areas (the ImageTwin website being one example, and the online resource archive Tech Exchange), and they are apparently taking a body-scanner to SIGGRAPH this year as well. They also have developed a lot of new products and equipment for the digital textile printing industry and are the folks who conducted the landmark SizeUSA study of anthropometric measurements across a range of USA demographics.

The second stop was at the offices of the non-profit advocacy and development group, Cotton Incorporated, a resource and research organization that furthers the development of the international cotton industry, and the third stop was the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University.





[TC]2


this is one of the digital fabric printers at TC2, printing yardage


some sample products made from digitally-printed textiles


garments and home goods made from digitally-printed textiles


schematic of textile printing designs for a line of swimwear


hand-painted designs have been scanned and reproduced at different scales onto different size products


Gerber cutting machine

It's funny, just this past weekend, i was visiting my grandfather who worked his entire career in the Berkline furniture factory in Morristown, TN. We were talking about fabric manufacturing machinery in relation to my post a few weeks back about the Wolf Blazer round knife and he told me about when Berkline installed its first Gerber machine to cut the upholstery fabric for their furniture. Uncanny that he would mention that last weekend, and here i am this weekend checking out what's the newest innovation from Gerber in industry cutting machines. We saw this machine cut a set of handbag linings in like, 2 minutes.


here's something i want at work: those blue bags are attached to vacuum hoses
that suck serger waste right off the blade--no pile of linty serger worms!


this is the industrial version of a bullet steamer



Cotton Incorporated


this machine turns cotton fiber into roving


this machine spins cotton thread onto spools


i love strange industrial iconography--this indicates only trained employees can operate the machine


industrial knitting machine


enormous dye vat


this machine runs the king of all spin-cycles


these dye machines look a bit more familiar


sample dyeing machine in the color-matching lab


i am a fool for dye record forms--i couldn't xerox them so i took pictures


another dyeing form



NCSU College of Textiles


jacquard loom


antique cord braider machine


modern loom


19th century loom


punchcard patterns for weave designs


this black fabric is being woven from carbon fiber


dyeing large amounts of yardage


this machine was in operation, looping the blue fabric through a dyebath continually,
with a motion kind of like a taffy-pulling machine


garment pieces digitally printed with gear motifs on lycra
for a production by the Carolina Ballet


some samples of 3D-woven fabrics, used in applications like car bodies,
boat hulls, and Mars landers (seriously)


student projects of themed jacquard collections of
fabric motifs such as this hung around the building


old sock knitting machine


giant samples of different kinds of knit patterns


manual knitting machine


larger tube knitting machine

You know, i could probably write a few screenfuls of text about all this, but frankly, i'm pooped! After our long day of tours, we all adjourned to the Carolina Inn for bluegrass and beer on their front lawn, which was lovely but wasn't exactly conducive to my spending the rest of the evening writing up my thoughts on the intersection between industry, manufacturing, science, artisanship, craft, and artistry. In fact, just articulating that much pretty much did me in. So, i'm going to hope that my thirtysome photographs are worth thirtysomethousand words for you guys, and see about a hot bath and a good book!

Tomorrow...finishing up our coursework projects and the end of this amazing long-weekend of learning!

Comments

[eggies-red-dres.livejournal.com]

You got a look at carbon fiber fabric in the ... flesh? Very super cool.

[labricoleuse.livejournal.com]

Yes! According to the talk given by their dean at the beginning of our tour, they partner with a LOT of industries, who build facilities on their campus that do funded research, so their textiles college produces totally state-of-the-art crazy stuff that schools who don't have cooperative relationships with the same industries might not have the ability to work on...including carbon fiber fabric. They also showed us some protective gear stuff they are working on (like implantable woven muscles for surgical replacement of damaged muscles that actually respond to electric impulses from the body) which was jaw-dropping. The carbon fiber stuff was pretty cool to get to see coming right off the loom!

[kleinerkolibri.livejournal.com]

wow...brings back so many memories of home! It still amazes me to see how different the textile program at NC State is from that of ECU. They have access to some incredible machines, how exciting to have gotten to see them up close!

[icprncs.livejournal.com]

This was absolutely fascinating (as was the last one). Thank you for sharing all this.

[leebee7.livejournal.com]

I looked at the giant samples of knit patterns and thought "They'd make great art for my wall".
Thank you for posting these pics, they're fascinating.

[labricoleuse.livejournal.com]

I bet you could make some for wall art purposes! These were done with what looked to be large-ish cotton cord (like goes into the middle of upholstery piping) and attached at the ends to a foamcore base with straight-pins.

[atomicgypsy.livejournal.com]

i loved reading this! and those victorian inspired fabric samples are just lovely!