A Visit to the Textile Lab

The Textile Centers Textile Lab is the first of its kind in Iceland. It blends state of the art equipment with digital technology with Tc2 digital looms, a felt loom, laser cutter, 3D printer, tufting machine, digital embroidery machine and a sophisticated knitting machine or Kniterate. The Lab is also involved with bio textile development. 

My new friend Klara from Sweden is pictured at one of the digital looms weaving with rags.

This coat fabric was woven at the digital loom and is smashing!

I love this piece made using the laser cutter. Fish leather was cut with slits that can interlock.

These are examples of 3D printing on fabric.

I am not sure I totally agree with the sentiment on this sample of digital knitting but I had to smile.

---

I was especially excited by a collaboration project between the Textile Lab and Biopol called Living Purple.  They did research to develop a sustainable dye process on wool using a bacteria that can be extracted from the environment and then grown in a lab nurtured by waste products like fish processing waste. The bacteria contains the purple pigment violacein. The bacteria is completely safe and may include anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-tumoral properties. At the same time the process eliminates environmental pollutants and reduces water usage.

Below you can see fleece samples from the original tests.

The following samples are yarns dyed shades of purple and samples of yarn dyed first with rhubarb root and lupin leaves and flowers and then over-dyed with violacein.

Here fabrics were dyed in various techniques.