Our first explorations involved very simple ingredients: thermovinyl, parchment/baking paper and heat. By cutting out airchannels by hand from baking paper, and creating little pockets by welding together two parts of vinyl with heat (using a heat press or iron), we were able to explore some movements and dynamics. Two layers of vinyl are welded together unless there's baking paper between the layers. Where there's baking paper, air can circulate (the baking paper are the air channels). It's not very straightforward to guesstimate what these shapes will do though! So it was good to explore a little first.
Our first explorations involved very simple ingredients: thermovinyl, parchment/baking paper and heat. By cutting out airchannels by hand from baking paper, and creating little pockets by welding together two parts of vinyl with heat (using a heat press or iron), we were able to explore some movements and dynamics. Two layers of vinyl are welded together unless there's baking paper between the layers. Where there's baking paper, air can circulate (the baking paper are the air channels). It's not very straightforward to guesstimate what these shapes will do though! So it was good to explore a little first. These are the basics as described by Adriana in the lecture:
*How to do a simple inflatable, Adriana Cabrera for Fabricademy, 2019*
*Studying simple variations on a shape, Loes Bogers, 2019*
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@@ -56,6 +58,8 @@ Our first explorations involved very simple ingredients: thermovinyl, parchment/
* Check out [Adriana's nice design pointers in the lecture notes!](https://class.textile-academy.org/classes/week11/) They went up a little late this week but would have been really useful to review them again instead of inventing the wheel haha. Next time :)
* Be brave and do it with biosilicon instead of silicon silicon, like [Gabriela Lotaif's tests](https://class.textile-academy.org/2020/gabriela.lotaif/) with alginate in Barcelona. Greaaat!
*Some design patterns described by Adriana in the lecture, Adriana Cabrera for Fabricademy, 2019*
**About substrates**
I noticed already at this stage that the inflatables behaved very differently when you leave one side of the hard plastic backing on. It helps to control the motion into an upward movement, rather than a cringing, shrinking effect. In this video you can see all samples first with the backing still stuck to the back, and then again without any rigid plastic, just the soft vinyl.
