Bark Weaving
During first design experiment (cutting, sewing, and folding) is became clear that flexibilized pine bark has a high tensile strength in longitudinal and can easily torn apart against fiber direction. By using weaving technique, bark stripes (fibers, depending on the width) can be woven in specific patterns to use tensile strength and flexibility and avoiding material failures by twisting.
Weaving is a method were a textile is created be using two thread (in a right angle) to tangle them together in a specific pattern. The longitudinal threads, which staying, got interwoven by the weft (bark fibers). For the weaving process, the warp threads (cotton) are separated by raising or lowering held frames. The repetition of this raising and lowering in a specific rhythm creates a weaving pattern. Depending on the amount of threads, weaving pattern compressing of fibers a textile can get different characteristics like, flexibility, density, tensile strength. Because of the limited length of bark fibers (pieces could be of course many meters long, depending on the tree but in my peeling I decided to peel maximum 1m) it was for first test better to use cotton threads for warp treads. This gave the opportunity to weaving longer pieces for get a feeling for the flexibility of a woven park sheets. The weaving machine was a manual one in which each warp threads floats over 16 bark weft threads. First tried weave structures was plain weaving. The aim of the first weaving test was to recreating a “covering material/ second skin” for different design application.