Eighth 'Explore Creativity' lesson- Pleating techniques

This week's session aimed to teach the students a new, extremely interesting technique called pleating'.The main idea is creating lines on a paper, folding them in any preference, then adding a piece of fabric in between two same folded papers, ironing it for for 15 minutes to half an hour, and then the chose shape will be transferred to the fabric.
The class started with a presentation of the owner of  Ciment Pleating , who explained us the process of pleating and brought many different pleated samples for the students to see.

Then the class started with two basic pleating techniques which where achieved by folding straight lines.

knife pleat

box pleat

The next  pleating technique was like accordion and it was more complex, so Caryl Court explains in simple steps how it works, in the following videos:

And this is my try:

Coming back home I continued trying some other pleating techniques with the help of the internet and books.I created some more pleated fabrics and the process is shown in the following pictures. The first one starts with the rule " score-create-press-release" and it starts with the following pattern:

The next technique is based on the rule 'fold-create-fold-pleat' and it was a try to create triangles.You can find the technique in the book Folding Architecture:

Another pleating style I found in the book Supersurfaces was the following one and it is easy to achieve by following the steps in the following pictures that i took while the process:

Origami shape by Issey Miyake

 One last pleating style I created, was an own try of mine, to create a new shape out of the combination of the previous techniques i practiced on. Following this pattern, you will be able to shape the following result.

origami dress( not by me)

Shenaz Engineer:

The following pictures are from the fall/winter 2011 collection of Shenaz Engineer and I find them very interesing and they include creative pleating techniques.