here’s one I made earlier :: wood tailoring

When I met Emma Marga Blanche and Fredrik Färg at Stockholm Design Week last year, they’d just bought each other a state of the art sewing machine for Christmas. They’d also just launched the highly FAB Chair Couture – chairs whose backs you can change like different dresses for different occasions. Most designers would still just be making lots of those. Not these two.

At Stockholm Design Week 2014, they launched Wood Tailoring. They wanted to see just how far they could push their sewing machine. They started with leather, moved onto a material usually used for insulation and eventually, the inevitable happened and they tried wood. I’ve seen embroidered wood before, but only where it has been created by hand sewing through pre-drilled holes. Fredrik and Emma actually push wood through their super sewing machine.

“We work a lot with textiles and sewing, so we wanted to experiment with sewing, but without the textiles – we wanted to use our sewing machine with hard materials. It’s sewn right through the wood. The technology is really recent, so we wanted to show what’s possible. This is a really experimental collection, but we’ve been talking to producers,” said Emma.

Fredrik added, “We’ve had the idea for a long time, but even we didn’t know if it would work, and it didn’t really work at the beginning – it’s taken a long time to make it work. We call it wood tailoring – there is a feeling of cutting it in 2D and putting it together like a suit. People don’t believe that the layers are actually sewn together. We have to take the whole piece into the machine – you get one shot at getting it right. It feels organic in a way, like contours on a map, or growth rings in a tree. It’s nice to find an organic way to work with wood that suits our work with textiles.”

Less than a week after launch the Layer Armchair has already been honoured with a FORM +1 Award, presented at the Stockholm Furniture Fair.

Further reading for the especially geeky:

• here’s one I made earlier :: shed test
• here’s one I made earlier :: jailmake snowflake
• here’s one I made earlier :: janet stahelin edmondson
• here’s one I made earlier :: kethi copeland