One of my earlier experiments was making a collage out of paper scraps, so this time I decided to try it out with fabrics. Since I have been working a lot with fabrics in fashion school and I have so many leftover fabric scraps, I decided that I could at least give this a try. My plan was to be much more detailed than I was in the end, also because I found out that I didn’t have too much of the colours that I wanted to have and I didn’t want to use new fabrics, because this was supposed to be a project that uses up some of my fabric scraps. It started out with chaos. The chaos of rummaging through all of the fabric scraps that I still have at home. Then I chose some that fit the colour and topic scheme that I was focusing on for this part of the experiment.
The next step was to try to choose which of the coloured fabrics to use for which motive and cut it out, while trying to focus on which kind of fabric to use for what part of the project and what structures to combine for the right outcome. For the first part I worked solely with red fabrics and decided to just use the fancier ones, since the others just didn’t seem to work for this pattern-wise. I ended up choosing an old fabric of a ballgown and some lace to cut out a pomegranate, again standing for Iran, as well as some lace detail, to make it more interesting structure-wise. We are still on the same topic of using food as a political symbol for a certain culture.
The second idea was to use more yellow and light green colours, as well as, other Ghanaian fabrics that were leftover of some t-shirts to create a plantain and some colourful background representing Ghanaian culture a little bit. Luckily I still had a few fabrics left that made this composition work, otherwise it would’ve been harder to achieve.
In general I tried to find some more fabrics for other compositions, but since I didn’t find the right colours, for instance for another watermelon or for some other fruits or vegetables that algined to my chosen topics, I decided to just stick with the ones that I could make more easily. In the following pictures you can see my end-results for these types of experiments. I recommend you to give this technique a go as well, since it is a more crafty approach and includes some materials that some people tend to not work with that often. The goal of this process would be to then also really put it on a different kind of fabric and make a full collage out of it by sewing everything onto the base fabric. But I just wanted to try out the main idea for this experiment.
