During spring Barnacle Geese start arriving in the Helsinki area. These birds – especially, their pervading noise and excrements – inspired this project. In order to honour their noticeable presence I wanted to create a storytelling lace about them using different finishing methods on felted wool. The technical research behind this project was driven by a curiosity for lace-making and finding simpler and quicker ways to create lace like structures. The first samples were done combining tuck-/slipstitch knit structures and resist felting methods to see if and how they can resemble filet lace structures. After creating small samples I decided to work with a tuck-stitch structure and resist felt a simplified design onto the final piece. The texture felted into square like shapes somewhat resembling the filet lace pattern. I chose the apron design as my final piece based on lace aprons that were traditionally worn by women in a domestic setting sometimes also as part of traditional garments from Germany (e.g. as part of the Dirndl Tracht). The design motif chosen for the felted lace is meant to break the stereotypical notion of the apron. Since I was not sure whether the resist felting idea would come out visible enough I decided to try out one more method using the laser cutter. For that the lace pattern was laser cut into a single-knit felt structure. This allowed for a much more detailed design but perhaps a less interesting texture/structure in the knit piece.
