What is the technique?

Fusing of plastics is when layered, heated, and pressurized, plastic bags will melt or fuse to each other or themselves creating a new type of durable, sewable fabric.

 

What are the materials needed?

• Iron
• Ironing board
• Any form of plastics (bags, straws, etc.)
• Baking paper
• Scissors

 

How to achieve the technique?

Note: Collect plastics for this technique.

1. Flatten out the bags, and trim off any seams or handles. Design the layout of the plastics based on your planned design or spontaneously.
2. Pre-heat a dry iron to a temperature somewhere between medium and medium-high (trial and error of the temperature to see which works best).
3. Sandwich the flattened plastic between 2 sheets of baking paper.
4. Iron across the surface of the sandwiched papers and plastic. Peel back the baking paper to check how the plastic fusing is going.
5. Continue ironing if the plastics are not formed into one sheet. If the plastics are sticking to the baking paper or forming holes, means iron is too hot.
6. Iron more layers of plastic if you want to increase the thickness of the fused fabric.

 

What are the uses and applications of the technique?

• Wearable item
• Jewellery
• Lampshades
• Bags (recycled grocery bag, etc.), pouches.

 

Photos of experimentation with technique

At this point of experimentation, there were no specific designs or artists that I was inspired from. Instead, these are the first batch of experimentation when everything was done randomly.

 

Own personal reflections

Plastic fusing is a technique which gives an unpredictable outcome because of the different types of plastics used, and the heat from the hot iron. This is because the plastics we used are not all the same in terms of thickness and the properties may differ per plastic.

Different types of plastics = the temperature of the hot iron may not be the same for all the plastics you would like to fuse together. Therefore, some of the plastics had “holes” effect while some does not due to the temperature of the hot iron.

I feel that plastic fusing is a playful technique as it allows us to play with the temperature of the hot iron and the designs – to be planned or completely random.