craftworkbook

As promised here is the design process for the Kabbalah bracelet. So I started off by looking up images of yarn on google images:

Then I looked at the yarn I have around and did some initial sketches. Mostly the sketches were too rope like. Looking at the actual yarn i had I realized I needed elongate the twist shape.

Then to refine the drawing I did some sketches in Illustrator. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a knot, or a plain piece of yarn. These were pretty rough sketches. I printed them out to get a better sense of how they would look. I still wasn’t very happy with them. So then I started sketching on top of the print out and came up with a pattern I was satisfied with. I decided not to go with the knot, because the scale of the yarn detail and the size of the knot would not work in embroidery on a bracelet.

So then refined the sketch in Illustrator and printed out a few sizes of the yarn. I wanted to make the pattern as large as possible to cut down on the embroidery time. But when I taped my prototypes onto my wrist, the pattern of the yarn was completely lost as the bracelet wrapped around my wrist. I also played around with the border size and shape in the prototyping process.

During design, doing quick and dirty prototypes is a good way to make sure the final product (which presumably requires more time investment) comes out how you want it to. Making the bracelet prototypes yielded some unexpected information such as the yarn pattern size to wrist diameter relationship, which I would not have figured out otherwise.

That said, I still think the final product could have used some more refinement. In order to make the pattern work with wrist curvature and still make it possible to be easily embroidered, I had to shrink back down the twist size. This I think makes the bracelet read more like a piece of rope than a piece of yarn. I think if I were to pursue this further, I would abandon the embroidery process, and go to a silkscreened pattern, which would better suit the shape of the design.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 20th, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Design Process, Embroidery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.