This is my first attempt at making sustainable textiles from dried fruit and veg (cucumber). I was really interested when I found Suzanne Lee’s ‘Bio-couture’ creations made from kombucha leather and began to widen my research into other sustainable textiles. Originally I had been looking into Irrational fear & phobia as a running theme for my project, one of my main ideas was to represent ‘fear’ through textiles. I linked irrational fear to the feeling of irritating and uncomfortable textiles touching ‘the body’. Since researching this I became fascinated with the idea of creating and experimenting with my own kind of irritating and uncomfortable materials. I have been looking a lot into the idea of alive vs dead when it comes to objects and materials and when I found out it was possible to make a textile out of dried fruit I was very interested to try this technique.

To create this ‘cucumber fabric’ I sliced the cucumber into very fine pieces so they could almost be seen through. Next I placed the cumber pieces so they overlapped each other on a piece of tissue paper. Then I placed another piece of tissue paper on top and moved them onto a microwaveable plate. Then I put the plate into the microwave and placed two heavy plates on top of the paper to weigh it down. After this I set the microwave for 1 minute on a full heat, after the 1 minute the tissue paper becomes damp and I replaced this with new tissue paper and repeated the process until the paper was almost dry when removed. Next I pressed the veg paper between heavy books for two days until it is completely dry and the image was my end result.