Boing Boing: An artist named Amanda Meyer created an incredible dress out of autumn leaves. Meyer soaked the leaves in a glycerin solution to preserve them — glycerin replaces the water inside each leaf, keeping it pliable and colorful rather than letting it dry out and crumble — and then hand-stitched them all together. It took her 30 hours to complete.
5 comments:
This is a really cool project. I've honestly never seen this done before, and it is super impressive. I didn't know you could simply soak leaves in glycerine to preserve them and keep them looking alive without drying out. The final result she accomplished is really neat. I'm curious about how effective the glycerine was in strengthening the leaves. How difficult were they to sew with? And I wonder whether it will dry out and if the color will change. But this is pretty cool and honestly I'm surprised I haven't seen it done before. I see a lot of different fashion things, I saw one this week on instagram of a girl making a dress that looks like a flower. She did a pretty good job with it. I was also surprised to hear that this project on ly took 30 hours, I know it certainly would've taken me more time. But when you use specific skills a lot, you are able to bring nbig projects together in a much shorter amount of time.
Using nature to make art is one of my favorite things to experiment with. If you have ever taken a piece of paper outside with a piece of chalk or charcoal and taken a leaf rubbing you will have realised that there is so much more texture and variation from leaf to leaf. This project reminds me of my time spent playing with my cousin when I was younger; We would run around outside collecting sticks, bark, leaves, and flowers to make fairy houses and fairy dresses. This dress looks exactly like one of those fairy dresses sized up to human scale. I would love to have a dress like this, but it would supposedly be a lot sturdier with a different fabric being used to emulate the leaves. The color palette of fall always reminds me of jumping in leaf piles and taking walks in the brisk autumn air. I grew up in Massachusetts, so I grew up with some of the most beautiful fall leaf colors imaginable.
I saw this circulating online before I thought it was a news page article and it definitely caught my eye because I think working with non-traditional materials is very interesting. This reminds me of some versions of book dresses that I've seen online and that I know a friend who made one.Where the pages of books are shown together and are not quite as tight of a dress as this one is because the book pages are not as flexible as these leaves are and so the dresses tend to be a little bit looser when made out of paper but still very cool and a similar idea of like patch working a non traditional material. I think that this is very interesting as a concept but realistically probably not useful as an everyday technique for making clothes. but exploring the variety of options we have when considering fabric is always beneficial.
This is super cool. Very curious about the glycerin process from a chemical perspective. I guess it makes sense that dried and heated glycerin would cause the cellulose structure to remain intact and flexible over time but I’m not totally sure about how it would achive this fabric-like texture. I think the difference between glycerin and water here is almost certainly that glycerin’s increased molecular weight while maintaining the same overall bonding forces as water enables it to stay inside the leaves where water would evaporate and leave the cellulose all crunchy and bad. It’s also interesting that these leaves seem to have had some of their color preserved, many of them still containing a touch of green. I feel like that might just have to do with the recency of the leaves falling though because surely glycerin is not capable of actually preserving the chlorophyll, but what do I know. Maybe some day I’ll get to take the Chemistry of Dyes course we have and find out (I’m pretty sure Professor Silva who is the best teaches it).
I love when artists create art from unique items because they can. I never would have thought about making a dress from real leaves. Fake ones yes, but real ones no, mostly because I would have had no idea how to make the leaves into a medium that I could actually work with without them breaking. I would be really interested in trying the method of soaking them in glycerin to make them able to work with. I am also really curious about the science behind it and why it works. The article says that it looks like the dress was made by and for fairies and I completely agree. The patchwork of squares and organic shapes feels so magical and like she was working with the leaves instead of just using the leaves. I know that the dress is probably incredibly fragile, but I am curious if it is stronger than we might think.
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