The Line That Took a Year

The Problem

The seam had to do two things that pull against each other: follow the body, and stay straight when the piece is laid flat.

A seam that follows the body curves. A curved seam looks like a mistake when the object is photographed flat, which is how most people will first see it. Every solution favours one context and betrays the other.

Creative Exploration

Thirty-one drawings, of which about twenty were variations on two ideas.

The first idea was to compromise — a shallow curve, wrong in both contexts but not badly wrong in either. Those versions are the most competent and the least interesting, and they occupied about four months.

The second idea was to stop treating flat as a real context. That produced better objects and worse photographs, and it lost, but it took a long time to lose because it was more fun to draw.

Design Decisions

The decision, when it came, was to go back to version four.

Version four had been drawn in the first fortnight and set aside as too simple. It resolves the tension by moving the seam entirely — putting it where the body does not require it to curve, which costs a small amount of fit and eliminates the problem rather than balancing it.

Nothing was learned in months five through eleven that was not available in week two. What those months produced was the confidence to accept a solution that had felt like giving up.

Hidden Details

The relocated seam leaves a panel slightly larger than it would otherwise be, and that panel is now the one place on the piece with enough uninterrupted surface to show the material properly.

That was not the intention. It was noticed afterwards, and it is the main reason the piece photographs the way it does.

The thirty-one drawings are numbered in sequence and version four is not marked in any way. Somebody going through them would have no way to know which one was chosen.