First experiments

Human hair

I love how different everybody's hair is. It can be beautifully light and soft and almost transparent as it glows in the daylight. It can also be coarse and dark and resemble the spikes of a porcupine. It could be fun to make braids so tight they could stand up vertically on their own. Playing around with its absorbability could also be interesting.

Below is a picture of my flatmates beard hair drenched in water and scrunched into a ball.



Tape

This material is interesting because it is sticky and makes it easy to create ocean-like waves without having to mess around with its actual chemical make up. This is the kind of thing I have briefly played around with. However it could also be neat to burn the tape in places, or roll it up into bits and build interesting little structures with it.

Pashmina Wool

This fabric is very soft. I thought it would be fun to cut and shred and pull it to lots of little pieces and making a giant pile of confusion. I ended up burning my scarf, which had a pretty cool effect, it burned slowly and completely changed color which was neat - I love mostly how the edges around the central burning point crumpled and waved. Here are my two most successful experiments with this material:

 
 

Foam

Spongey goodness! I can imagine so many awesome possibilities with this material. It is just so satisfyingly squishy. Today I decide to cut it up and twist it and then burn the top a bit. Looks like toast. I see potential with it, maybe if i found some nicer foam, especially. I would like to cut lots of little shapes and stack them, crumble it really fine, see how well it absorbs and holds liquid...

 

Synthetic Cotton Wool

I found some of my old McDonalds happy meal toys and pulled out all the insides of them - found this weird cotton wool, i'm not sure if is the usual stuff. Anyway, it was the most fun out of all of the materials I manipulated. I think I am going to choose this for my final project, I like it because it can look totally airy and transparent and also thick and spooky or like a spider web (this happened when I burned it over a large metal object). Here are some pictures of my experiments although these pictures don't really do them justice, I would prefer to use a better camera and lighting: