Aluminium Skirt
○ "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.
Both pieces where riveted on one of the sides. Finally, the two sides that would be 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.
