bacterial cellulose project
Project Overview
I am really interested in sustainable fashion design, especially when it incorporates any making of bio textiles in the design process. This was my first exposure to growing a bio material from scratch, the pellicle. I knew I wanted to make some sort of wearable object out of it and decided on making a belt. To incorporate more sustainable fashion practices I also decided I would dye the pellicle before I constructed it into the belt using natural dyeing processes, as the material easily soaks up liquids. There were so many obstacles in creating the pellicle, pink mold contamination (which inspired the dye color used) , timing with the treatments, and drying process. It took over two weeks to completely dry so belt coming soon!
Process
This may not have been the best or “correct” way to go about how to do things but this was mine:
After following lab procedures on how to go about creating material, we found that my pellicle had grown mold on it!
After days of decontaminating with bleach and constant pH checks, the mold was completely cleaned off:
Now the actual treatments could start, first I created a dye bath by boiling about 3 liters of water with five avocado pits for an hour and got the light pink color I was aiming for. I moved the pellicle from the plastic bin to a bucket where I let it sit in the dye bath for roughly 24 hours and added 60 mL of glycerol (from station dye kitchen) after that first day. It then sat in this dye and glycerol bath mix for another 48 ish hours. I took it out and let it get semi dry (about 2 days) and it was at this point I began planning more or less how I wanted the design of the belt to be, but ultimately I wanted the material to tell me how it wanted to be turned into a belt vs me trekking it how it should act so I let a lot of it come to be as I went along.
After letting it dry up a bit in those two days I measured the pellicle and equally cut it into long rectangular strips using a pair of regular scissors.
Then I hand wove it and left it drying on the lid of the plastic container I grew it in. I chose to dry it this way because I noticed that every time I placed the pellicle onto the lid the markings of the lid would imprint not the pellicle and I wanted the pellicle to dry with the texture of what it was lain on. This also gave me the idea to take the starting pellicles, the babies which stayed their small circle size, and dry them onto a sort of crocodile skin purse I own hoping they would dry with this animal print texture. This was done intentionally to combine the contradicting ideas of an animal skin belt made from a biomaterial grown in a lab. Excited to put it together and sew into it soon!
material sample of it dried:
