Wednesday, June 20, 2012

CherRepair is finally blogging!

A short background: My name is Cherilyn I am a self-taught seamstress working in the Philadelphia area. I mostly repair clothing but I also have tried my hand at costuming and clothing design. Most recently I have had the opportunity to work on large scale art installation projects, namely covering iron sculptures with fabric.

I hope to document and share my work here in order to help inspire, create dialog for learning and to celebrate the art of sewing. I will also be shamelessly promoting the amazing work of other artists and businesses with whom I've had the pleasure of working. It is my hope that readers may be able to contact these folks if they so desire.

Latest Project:
I figured it was about time to start showcasing my sewing work in blog-form. I just completed some work for the 3-day Phish concert in Atlantic City and I was really pleased with the results!






PS: Not sure who made the covers for the bases of the towers - maybe I can find that information if anyone is interested or if someone out there knows please let me know!

Each tower was about 8 feet high and there were 8 towers altogether. I measured and patterned each tower by section, making a paper pattern of each shape. Most shapes were cut 8 times but there were a few smaller top sections where I got away with piecing 4.


Lycra was a dream to work with because the 4-way stretch absorbed most patterning mistakes and sewing each section together would have been an easing nightmare with anything else. I mostly used my serger to put these together but I used a straight stitch to attach industrial strength Velcro. Each outfit had a removable hood and a Velcro seam up one side of the entire structure. The hoods were then secured to the rest of the outfit with Velcro.


Once I would piece one section together I needed to make sure it was the right size so I had to fit each individual section and then refit the entire outfit once it was all one piece. It was a difficult process because even with the measurements I was taking, the sections could end up being off by a lot because all 8 shapes were not identical. After this first attempt I used the average measurements of all 8 shapes and the Lycra accounted for the differences.




You can get an idea of the fitting process from this image where the last section hasn't been sewn to the rest of the bodice just yet. 


Here we have one finished piece. This was the first one as I mentioned before so I was unaware of the need to make the hoods removable at this point. I later went back and detached the hood. This was needed because of the way the sculptures were going to be hoisted and placed on poles 25 feet in the air.


Ready for hoisting!





25 feet up!

More to follow soon!