Drawstring Bag Project

The outline of this project was to introduce us to textile/ fabric as a medium of form and structure. I began the project by brainstorming my own cultural identity and trying to find a symbol to represent myself as a marker. As you can see from the image below I have listed my thoughts on this subject matter along with a couple of illustrations of what my culture means to me as well as some research that I had done on the web to find out exactly why cultural identity is so important to us. Making these notes helped me find what I wanted to use for my cultural identity marker for this particular project. As I have grown up in Singapore I have been exposed to a lot of great architecture which I wanted to carry forward in putting together a piece that makes me think of home. The identity marker I chose after my exploration of ideas was the Marina Bay Sands building located in the Central Business District (CBD) of Singapore. It is a magnificent hotel building which is known for its breathtaking views and holds the record for the highest infinity pool in the world, 650 feet above ground level.

After jotting down these notes and making these two drawings I knew that I wanted to replicate the Marina Bay Sands Hotel buildings so I went onto illustrator and did a tracing of the buildings to create my own vector file to then create as an imprint on the textile I would use to attach it onto my bag.

This above is the entire tracing that I made of Singapore’s skyline. However after some quick deliberation I found that there is no attention being drawn into the actual buildings that I had planned to showcase. I then simply cut the buildings and the flower dome which is also iconic to Singapore away from the rest of the buildings to use as my marker. After which I made an appointment at the design lab to print this design onto some heat transfer paper so as to then iron on the patches onto the fabric that I had purchased.

After printing these markers onto the iron on paper I then transferred the design with an iron onto some white fabric which I followed up by cutting rectangles around the image transferred onto the fabric. I then went to class with the fabric that I had been kindly given by the fabric and textile lab. In class I learnt how to use a sewing machine and was also shown ways in which we had to fold the bag to stitch it together in order to construct the bag. I learnt how to backstitch and was pleased with the outcome of my stitch even though it was not very straight.

 

After finishing the lining of the backstitching our class had come to an end and so we had to go back home to add the cultural markers of our peers as well as ours and also the drawstring in order to complete the construction of the bag.

Above is an image of the bag without the drawstring and before I stitched the cultural identity markers given to me by my peers in class as well as mine.

 

Above are two close up photographs of the finished product- sewn in markers and thread going through the opening at the top of the bag.

 

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