Steve’s Laser Cut Dress
(Group 2)
Group members: Alexandra Oxenstierna, Charlotte Chang, Richard Yang, Yvette Luo
Theme and Concept
Steve is a professional ballet dancer. She is so dedicated to her career that she often practices 4 hours daily instead of the required 2.
However, Steve also has trauma because what she was asked to show on stage vastly differed from who she really is. Because of this, Steve often keeps her guard up, protecting herself with a shell.
So, our group decided to make a dance dress that connected her inner personality with her external expressions to make her happier.
Design and Inspiration
In our design, we use the auxetic material to represent Steve’s inter shell because it is tight, protective, but also flexible. We also use hard pleats at the chest part to serve as outer protection on Steve. Then, considering her dancer nature, Steve must maintain speed with runnable legs, which is why we used flowy pleats to for the bottom dress part. Lastly, we would like to add a hat with dangling veil to represent her mysterious personality.
Below are some of our design brainstorm process and sketches:
gathering inspiration and brainstorming
sketches
Laser Cutting Process & Experiment with Materials
This was our first attempt at the laser cutting machine. We cut the auxetic pattern but did not cut around the design, so we had to use the bandsaw machine to cut it out of the big wood piece. We realized the gaps between the triangles were too small, causing the triangles to snap off.
The material started to snap. Although it is wood and not as flexible as EVA foam, we decided to make the gaps within each triangle larger to allow the material to flex.
Since the wood material is too hard, we decided to use EVA foam for the auxetic part and we purchased them on Amazon. Cutting the foam is very different from cutting wood. We need to adjust the setting multiple times in order to find the right power and speed for an ideal result.
In addition to enhancing material selection, we found that our previous version of the auxetic pattern had limited stretchability. The small spaces between the cut lines made the pattern prone to tearing. As a result, we’ve made modifications and updated our auxetic design
Luckily, we were able to figure it out with some help from the mentors in the workshop. Then we start cutting pleats. We set the outlines as red and the inner lines as blue in order to cut the outside and scorch the folding lines.
In addition to the auxetics, we chose pleats as the primary material for Steve’s dress and as decorative elements in our design. The pleats covering Steve’s chest and shoulders symbolize his protective nature.
During the creation of the pleats, we experimented with various widths and sizes
Photos of Final Output
Auextic Tight-fitting Cloth:
With added hard pleats
Assembly
Once we had finalised the positioning of Steve’s inner dress cut in auxetic pattern from EVA foam, we began constructing the flowy pleats for the skirt of the dress. At first, we attempted scoring sheets of thin paper with the laser cutter to fold our pleats of varying widths. Through experimenting with different widths of fold, we came to the conclusion that ¼ inch was the best size for our pleats.
Whilst the laser cutter was effective in scoring the paper, we realised that paper as a material was too rigid in form to convey the elegant, dynamic curves that we wanted to create in order to represent Steve’s underlying desire for freedom and movement. Thus, we pivoted our idea by ironing pleats on thin, muslin cloth – this worked well to keep the shape of the folds.
After attempting to sew the pleats together to form the skirt, we encountered a challenge: our pleats were pinched together on one end (forming a fan shape), which meant that they could not align properly in rectangular rows and be easily sewn into a skirt. To overcome this challenge, we created a skeletal skirt frame by sewing rectangular strips of EVA foam into concentric circles and connecting them with vertical strips of foam (see below).
We crafted three layers of fan pleats to create the illusion of a full, plump skirt. In line with our theme of contrast, we opted to alternate our pleats with white, blue and black colored cloth.
Another challenge that we encountered was the weight ratio of pleat skirt compared to auxetic top; due to the elastic nature of the EVA foam combined with its auxetic cut, the top was increasingly stretched vertically as we added more pleats. To ensure that the top would not fall apart, we made sure to use super glue on all areas of potential structural weakness.
Our final output:
front view
back view
Key reflections on the project process:
-Explored different patterns and how they looked together first
-Decided what patterns to do and where on the dress
-Then decided a deeper meaning behind the design (normally designers do the opposite, but it was more important for us to explore different designs rather than creating a significantly impactful piece)
-Explored the laser cut first with wood
-Examined design, made adjustments to design