Collaboration project

I am a member of craft group ‘FORM‘ and at the start of 2020, we decided to have a project of two makers making collaborative pieces together with a theme of ‘TENSION’.
And all those things happened in the world. And the project was slowed down significantly. But we finally made a show over the weekend.

I was teamed up with Ariane, a clever lady works with metal to create beautiful jewellery.
We wanted to express something positive and happy. So the theme, tension was slightly twisted to ‘surface-tension’ because that physical phenomenon brings us so many beautiful things, don’t you think?

A long story short, we decided to create something to resemble ‘soap bubble’. Who doesn’t have a happy feeling with them floating in the air?
And we discussed, experimented with material and method and over this summer, the final piece started to make actual shapes.

The first difficulty was to cover the surface of sphere with random sized metal circles which was like a jigsaw puzzle and Ariane painstakingly made all those circles to fit all in the places. I did try to figure it out how it is possible but my brain totally gave up! Those circles are nicely thin but hard enough for handling.

Then it was my turn to make connection pieces with thread so they can be sewn together.

The each connection shapes were copied on a water soluble stabiliser and I stitched circles to fill up that space. The thread was 12wt Aurifil but that was still too thin against the metal part and not easy to stay in the shape. My solution was to zigzag over the single line of thread with the same 12wt thread and also that made sure the thread was thick enough for a needle to go through. That needle is size 10 between.

And there was a really slow hand sewing with a really slippery invisible thread to sew parts together. When all the parts were put together to complete the sphere, the stabiliser was dissolved to make it really magical!

We made five spheres in three different sizes and hanged them like floating in the air at the beautiful Kilgraney house for the show!

We are happy with the result of course. And also we loved the shadow created by them too!

Other member’s pieces were all beautifully and thoughtfully made and displayed in various location on the ground. Some made amazing variety of pieces from the same theme. I find it always interesting to see how different results come up from the same theme.