Cosmic Lilypad//A Knit LBD for my love and S T A L L I O N
I pitched the Material Insitute instructors on a dress that would be built on a metal frame and made in real time. I imagined knitting wide, flat strips, and weaving them between the gaps in the frame. Overtly, it was supposed to blur the lines between a knit and woven fabric-a woven made not from indivdual or twisted yarns, but from knit. It was also supposed to be a distillation of my ire. To that point in my year as a Material Institute cohort member,  I embraced it all: natural dye, illustration, pattern drafting, everything. When we started machine knitting, I absolutely loathed it. I wanted something that would still present well, but was ultimately simple, and that I barely had to bother making until the presentation.

I put together a presentation that I hoped would land well. As I walked through my design process, my audience was at first apathetic and increasingly appeared angry. After the concept, sketches, mockups, and final design plan, I waited for feedback, and nobody said anything for a while.

Nobody paid much attention to most of my presentation. Everyone was preoccupied with a number of sketches I created and abandoned early in the design process.

My instructors insisted I follow through with one of the designs. All it would require was completely abandoning my design process to that point and executing the design in about three weeks.

I  rush ordered a sample of every natural fiber cut and sew knit in white or off white available on Mood’s site (there were seven). In the interim, I prototyped the dress with salvaged cut and sew knit on a dress form. The samples took too long, so I purchased a wool rayon knit sight unseen a few days before the samples arrived. Waiting on the fabric cost me a week.

I lost another week to dyeing. Over the course of 40 hours, I would dip the yardage in iron liquor and pomegrante, allowing it to dry between each and rinsing after dipping in both.

Then I had to make the dress. My instructor, Ilse, pointed me to horsehair to better define the edges of the petals. I hoped to hand roll the hems to produce definition and enough weight at the ends, but it didn’t produce the desired result. I alternated between the form and Vanessa, getting an approximate shape on the form and refining the location for each petal’s terminus on her. I adopted a tailoring mentality and basted the garment together for fitting, marked adjustments, and then de- and re-constructed it with each fit.

I hand stitched the petals and decorative stitching using a color matched embroidery thread with lurex for some shimmer. The dress has no understructure or slip. I wanted the softness of the knit and the tension from the rigid thread to produce the texture on the surface of the final garment. The hand stitching took about 30 hours.

There is no closure for the dress. I sewed Vanessa into it for the presentation. We went to the guest house in the back of the Material Institute and I carefully worked the needles through the layers without poking her. The gentle give of the knit, the hand stitching, the placement of each unique petal, each step in the design process required an intimacy I worked to carry over into the feeling of the final design.





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