CONFIGURATIONS: Explorations in Offcut Biomorphology

Photo: Heather Dwyer

For most of this year, I have been sewing scraps together to make soft sculptures. I began this work at the Vashon Artist Residency on Vashon Island, Washington in February. It’s now October.

I got there with bags and bags of scraps (garment-making offcuts) and my sewing equipment.

I left with a carload of strange, squishy creatures. Their population has continued increasing since then.

Photos: Lola Miller

I don’t really know what to call them, yet. They’ve taken on personalities of their own.

The scraps I am using came from a local Seattle clothing company, Prairie Underground. Prairie Underground recognizes the amount of waste created by garment making, so they are happy to have me take bags of their offcuts away with me. I’ve gone back several times since for more offcut scraps. Since then I’ve collected offcuts of four types of fabric: black denim, striped denim, pinwale corduroy, and velveteen.

A bit about garment manufacturing: Lengths of fabric are laid out on a large table in layers.  A paper pattern layout or “marker” is laid on top. The cutter then cuts the layers with a fabric saw following the guidelines on the marker. The leftover bits in between the pieces to that will be made into clothing are what I have been working with. These scraps are called “offcuts.”

Originally I thought I was going to do some sort of improv piecing to make flat patchwork pieces, similar to pieces I have made before. But when I got to the residency, I playing with the shapes of these scraps, connecting them together to build a three-dimensional construct instead.  It looked strangely like a garment for an alien humanoid.

It got to be really big. I tried stuffing it but it was so heavy I could barely lift it. I thought of it as the behemoth.

So I began making smaller pieces. My decisions on how to put these pieces together was informed by the shapes of the offcuts themselves. I let the shapes dictate the structures, rather than cutting the shapes to suit a desired outcome. I found myself enthralled by the results – these geometric yet biomorphic forms surprised me.

Sometimes they came together easily. Sometimes I would try one way and then rip it out and try something different, like this piece that started out like this

but I ended up taking it apart and redoing it, and it became this.

I made parameters for myself, like a personal game or puzzle: I would work with the shapes of the scraps as found, but I could trim them to make them more consistent.

Overall, I sewed 13 black denim, 18 striped, 29 white corduroy, and 21 white velveteen constructs. A total of 81 individual sculptures. Some larger, some smaller.

The sewn white corduroy and velveteen pieces were sent to Prairie Underground’s dyers in California. I thought I had reinforced my seams enough to survive the process of agitation in the dye bath and tumbling in the dryers on high heat. Most of the corduroy pieces came out with minor damage, but of the 21 velveteen pieces, only 5 survived enough to be salvaged. The seams blew out in the rest. Carnage.

In keeping with the idea of using reclaimed materials, I didn’t want to buy new material to stuff these pieces with. Instead, I’ve used a combination of secondhand-sourced polyester fiberfill and more fabric scraps from Prairie Underground.

Thank you to Jennifer Porter at Satsuma Designs for chopping those scraps into shoddy for me with her fabric shredder so that I didn’t have to keep cutting it up by hand.

Above is a stash of the shoddy material along with some of the tools I use for stuffing, all thrifted (if anyone knows what the two right wooden pieces are really supposed to be used for, please let me know!)

Thank you also to Jacquiline Snider, Leslie Brown, Ann Niklason, and Jesse Proebstel for their help with sourcing secondhand stuffed materials. Also thanks to Goodwill Industries, Granny’s Attic on Vashon Island, Seattle Recreative and Freecycle Seattle.

Some of the finished pieces are stuffed with the bodies of their kin – those that died in the dying process.

Stuffing was harder than I thought it would be. Some of the pieces took longer to stuff than they did to sew together.

I have been working on these pieces for the past 8 months. What has kept me interested? I like puzzles. I like making something out of nothing. I like problem solving. These are small, manageable tasks that require attention and skill. When it seems like the world is falling apart I crave something concrete to focus on putting together.

And who doesn’t like cuddly art forms?

Two pieces were in the Vashon Artist Residency show, “Ignited By Vashon,” at the Vashon Center for the Arts last month.

Next month, Prairie Underground is hosting a show of a selection of these offcut configurations in their factory-showroom gallery in Georgetown for the month of November. The opening reception is Saturday, November 8th, 2:00 to 6:00pm, 940 South Harney Street, Seattle, WA 98108.

I case you are curious, here are notes I wrote to myself  while working on these pieces.

• Check to make sure offcuts stack are all the same before assembling.
• Reinforce all joints.
• Make sure to have even number of pieces if folding in half.
• If it is too easy/obvious, I won’t like the result.
• Complexity is good. Makes the result more unexpected?
• There are many geometric directions to go in. Not just one option.
• Geometry lesson: conjoined angles cannot be greater than 360º or piece will become concave instead of convex.
• I would not have been able to devise these shapes on my own. I am grateful for the varied shapes of the offcuts.
• Perimeters will match, even if sewn together out of sequence.
• I just discovered how a baseball is made!
• I am not getting better at predicting what the end result will look like.
• I can use my left foot on the machine pedal instead of my right in order to use the lifting lever at the same time.
• I can’t commit the sin of wasting materials, because all my materials are waste.
• I am using the negatives spaces to make positive shapes.
• I have to have faith that all points will connect, one way or another.
• I feel like I am collaborating with the garment cutter.
• I wonder if the cutter will recognize the offcut shapes in these forms.
• Don’t lay pieces out on my lap to pin. Too inaccurate. Use floor or table.
• Don’t leave your opening seam as your last seam. Middle of the piece probably better.
• Baste edges of openings together before sending them to the dyers.
• Serge all edges of velveteen before dying in future to avoid blow-out?
• Take breaks every 20 minutes or your neck/shoulder/face will seize up.