CymaGlyph - A photograph made by the scientist John Stuart Reid. He has been capturing the vibrations of water when exposed to musical notes. In this case it is the musical note A. Each note shows a different geometrically shaped interference pattern, looking like a madala. This the core starting point for all shapes in the collection (the shape of soud).

This CymaGlyph was taken as a reference and interpreted as a line-drawing in Adobe Illustrator. At first, it was interpreted as a line drawing whereby the lines never cross. This was meant for the first step of bringing this 2D image into 3D space. The effect of this could not easily be guessed or estimated beforehand.

The illustrator drawing was uploaded into laser cutting software. When the right values were found for the black coated jersey material, my first laser cutting experiment was done. Height of 45 cm was the biggest possible size in the lasercutter at the MakersLab at the time. The result was a "web" of fabric with many cutouts. I chose for this mayerial because it would not fray. The laser beams also melt the cutting lies a bit. Thanks to this, no fiishig or treatment was needed to stop the fabric from faying for instance.

When pulling the balck curvy web into the air, I right away saw it as something almost wearable. Because of the size, I chose to drape it on the small scale wooden doll. I saw possibilities for the center of the ornament becoming a type of headpiece while the rest of the shape was draping around the body, down till the floor.

Drapes from different points were made, and evey time a different silhouette would appear. Cosistent factor was: it looked the best when keeping the ceter of the ornament on top or nearby the head. Only that way the ornament would drape in a symmertical way.

Sometimes it looked like a sturdy leather jacket, sometimes as a romantic/dramatic dress, dependig on the way it was placed on the body. Suprizingly, this CymaGlyph ahd a lot of potential of becoming clothing. I expected needing to make many steps towards wearability, but actually the ornament was at the best just straight how it already was.

Other experiments were made by combining other materials, for instance: ultra fine organza. The organza made an interesting tranparent, non transparent effect and actually influenced the shape too, giving support to the back coated jersey. I really liked this experiments, but now it was time to start experimenting in real scale. Things that work/look good in small scale do not give any guarantee of working out in real scale beacause the ratio between size and material thinkness does not stay thesame.

To make the experiment now in real size, in first started by simply blowing up the shape. What once was 45cm high would become now 150cm high. According to my previous experiment, the size should have been bigger, but I wasted to be cut out of 1 piece, and 150cm was the maximum what a fabric width would allow.

I laser-cut templates in cardboard, traced these on the fabric and cut the fabric by scissors. This was due to lack of a large laser cutting machine. It was very time consuming but I did get the info out of it, that I was searching for: does simply blowing up the ornament work or not? Well, the answer was: NO!!!!

Due to simple blow up the ornament lost it's "finesse" and the fabric was too sloppy whe used in real scale: it did not have enough body. It looked nothing like the small scale experiment.

The next steps were all about refining the ornament (by adding more lines), so it would look as complex as the small version in ratio with the body. I found my way to the InnovationLab, where they had a larger laser cutting machine. Because of the earlyer mentioned problem with the fabric width, I had to let go the idea of cutting the ornament form one piece of material.
It was not necessary to divide the ornament into segments that later could be connected as one very big ornament.