Who knew I would love spandex so much?

Sunday I woke up and had to get to Natalie's apartment by 1pm (her foot was fine, just badly bruised). Sarah and I met there and the three of us decided it would be a great idea to go to the Danish Design School, the school where we will be working in for the next few weeks. We had never been there so we took the train up to the Norhavn train station and found a) the bakery (very important to most participants of the DIS program) and b) the school. Now that we felt comfortable getting there, we decided to walk back. Since we have been meeting at the DIS building, that area is all we know, so why not explore the rest of the city and really take in the other neighborhoods, not just the tourist and central bubbles. So off we went on our merry way to try to find our way back to DIS. Of course, it started to rain, but within 25 minutes, we ended up in a familiar part of town, the King's Gardens, and knew our way back to DIS as if it were home. We actually ended up in the Secret Square and stopped for lunch at the place Nathalie Mahler suggested (it has no name that we remember). I ate a chicken, pineapple and chutney sandwich and it was delicious. Sorry about not taking a picture of it... next time I will. After lunch, we headed to DIS to work on our concepts. The three of us spent four hours there, working on our design concepts. Mine is about the Myyrnaki church right outside Helsinki and how every part of the church is inspired by the birch tree forest that surrounds it. So my concept is birch trees in textiles. I ended up making a repeat pattern of my whimsical, Dr.Seuss-like trees, to see if the horizontal and vertical lines would work together and not work the eye, but then looking at it from far away it looked a bit more like earth worms than trees. At that point, I rolled it up and called it a day, then headed to Chillimili's for dinner. After stuffing myself with delicious vegetarian food I headed back to Hvidovre and went to bed.

Yesterday, Katie and I met at 7:30am and headed to Natalie's apartment, then  to the train station that took us to the Danish Design School. We were supposed to meet at 9am, but we ended up getting there at 8:15am. Since we had 45 minutes to kill, we headed to the bakery, they bought buttery pastries while I bought a walnut roll with jam (delicious!) and decided to walk around and investigate the neighborhood. Everything was closed but there seemed to be stores everywhere.

 Finally 9am rolled around and we each got an ID card with a cartoon drawing of a man as our photo (funny because the ten of us are all girls). Got up to the textile studios (of course its the top floor) and got an introduction of our facility. The machinery is so much more high tech and impressive than anything we have at the University of Michigan. It make my jaw drop. Some of the things were old but at least they existed in the space! The first thing we learned was about "man-made fabrics" otherwise known as "synthetic materials"... polyester, spandex, nylon, rayon..etc. 

Since it is not natural and more or less plastic, we have the ability to form it into a shape. 

So lets say we have a piece of synthetic fabric and we take a pebble, place it in the middle of the fabric and then tie a piece of thread around it so that the fabric is covering the pebble, steam the fabric for an hour and cut the thread off, the fabric will hold the shape of it having a pebble. Why? Because the steam is heating the fabric so that the plastic fibers are flexible enough to form a new shape. ITS MIND BLOWING!!!The next thing we learned was to paint copy paper with polyester inks and then put it in a heat press with a piece of synthetic fabric and it creates a heat transfer...easy as that! That night, Katie and I came home, bought food and made a delicious chicken tikka masala, with rice, broccoli and peppers! It was delightful!

This morning was the hardest part of the synthetic materials assignments.  The third task was to combine the two things we already learned; creating an image from the heat transfer as well as using the 3-D form usage we learned that works with our concept. I felt a bit out of my league so I just decided to play around and hoped that something would come to me...AND IT DID! After trying a million samples, I figured out that I could pleat the fabric, heat transfer an image of a birch tree forest and then when it is closed, there is a forest, but when it opens up, you see the individual trees! IT WAS AMAZING! I FIGURED IT OUT!

 So now I am working on the color and will hopefully have an amazing piece to show later on this week! After Lunch we headed north to Jaegersborg Dyrehave, a forest/woodsy place where deer roam (and poop everywhere!) and horse carriages give tours while other bike, jog, hike and walk on the beautiful trails. There are so many deer there! We even saw an albino one! I am 100% going to take my mom there for a walk and picnic when she comes to visit me. Anyways, at the other side of the park, there is an old area where specialized crafts people live and work in their studios and we were there to meet up with Lisbet Friis , a textile designer with really cool, high quality and simple designs. 

We got to her studio and Gilhund was there to welcome us in. As we piled up in her studio she Lisbet began to explain her work to us. Her first ever exhibition, she decided to work with military medals and ribbons. The color, the meaning behind the stripes and what not. She showed us how certain colors for certain countries means the soldier fought in a specific region, was in prison and other interesting facts. So she made an amazing textile work revolving that. Then she was commissioned by the Queen of Denmark, to create a pattern to re-upholster her furniture in two rooms on her yacht (not bad ey?). After that she began making striped patterns and printing it on really nice quality Belgium linen and is making pillow covers out of them. In addition, she created patterns for an exhibition that was a  few hundred meters of patterned fabrics folded up as if it was a linen closet. She was so nice and answered all our questions over tea, coffee and CAKE that she made herself! After our field trip, we walked through the woods/forest back to the train station, I went to the grocery store on the way back to Hvidovre and then went jogging for 45 minutes.