For this week's project I chose to create a monstera leaf bralette inspired by Gucci's 2016 resort collection.
I loved the beautiful, intricate shapes of the leaves and I thought that the laser cutter would be the perfect tool to cut out such precise, delicate shapes. I bought felt, hemp and thread from Blick and embarked on my project.
I grabbed a picture of a monstera leaf from online and fiddled with it in photoshop until it was black and white. Then I moved the file into Illustrator and used image trace to create a vector from my image.
I emailed myself the Illustrator file and put it into the laser cutting laptop. From there I printed myself two small leaves.
However, I quickly realized that my two small leaves were too small to give me the coverage I needed, so I printed two larger leaves from my extra pieces of felt (the 3.14 rule really is true! I'm so glad I bought more felt than I thought I needed). I then layered the two leaves and sewed them together using my embroidery thread.
I thought my hemp string was a little thin so I braided it together to create the bottom band. I then sewed that on as well.
I ended up adding two more straps on each side because the leaf fronds were kind of flopping around. I also added some loose stitching along the top of the leaves to help the fronds stay close to my body instead of waving around in the air. This also helped create a cup shape for my bralette.
I also knotted two strands of hemp together to create my straps, partially because I was tried to braiding together the hemp and partially because I thought it would make it easier to join the straps to the band.
And that was it! I was done with my bralette.
The bralette is definitely a far throw from the Gucci one, which appears to be made of silk. However, I believe that it is totally possible the original was also laser cut! Especially since silk can be laser cut fairly easily, it just takes a very specific, finely tuned machine.