Sea Monster Inflatable Installation

This was a final project for my Inflatables course at Carnegie Mellon and was installed at the semesterly “Meet Me @” exhibition hosted by CMU’s Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology program. My group and I created a giant sea monster coming up through the floor, shown by two halves of a mouth and five tentacles spread throughout the room. I was in charge of the patterning, laser cutting, dying, and most of the sewing of the tentacles. I also sewed most of the teeth in the mouth of the monster.

One member of my group modeled the tentacles as simple shapes in Blender, then I went in and marked seams for the patterning. Deciding where to place the seams required a balance of creating visually unobtrusive lines that allowed for easy sewing and dying but didn’t take away from the overall look of the tentacle. Each tentacle was created with a unique shape and scale, so each one required its own careful seam placement and decision making for how many faces it should have vertically, where the “inside” or other color face should lay, and how large the pieces could be while still fitting on the 36”x48” laser cutter beds.

I considered cutting the pattern pieces out of cardboard and then laying them out as vertical strips to guide the fabric cutting, so that the final tentacles only had vertical seams but were perfectly smooth horizontally, but due to very tight time constraints I decided to instead leave the horizontal seams in the fabric. This meant that I spent a lot of extra time in Blender laying out the seams to line up well and fit the laser beds well, but it made fabrication significantly faster. I also utilized two incredibly helpful websites created by my professor Olivia Robinson, The Cuttery and The Flattery. They are two pattern making tools that sped up my process quite a bit; The Cuttery allowed me to lay out all of my pattern pieces for my laser cutter bed size, so when it came to actually laser cutting our ripstop nylon, all of my DXFs were already sized and laid out efficiently. The tentacles alone were 29 beds of laser cutting, which I did over two days.

Once I cut all the pieces (and, critically, labeled them as they came out of the laser!), it was time to dye. I used acid dye for the ripstop nylon. I used a 60% depth of shade (DOS) for a medium intensity teal color, 1 part Jet Black and 7 parts Turquoise. To the dye bath I also added a few drops of Synthrapol for improved dye penetration and to help suspend excess dye particles, as well as some citric acid as a fixer. I liked the color I achieved! I did all my dying in 3 vats to make sure the fabric had enough room to move around and get a nice even color.

Finally, it was time to sew up the tentacles. Two of the tentacles were sewn by my group mates and I sewed the other three. I created a fabrication guide for us to reference and helped make sure that their pattern pieces made sense and that they were confident sewing them together. I used a walking foot for most of the sewing, as ripstop nylon isn’t always the nicest to put through a sewing machine.

The install itself was easy; having a modular design for our project meant it was easy to split up the work and even easier to set up 7 smaller units instead of one large one. It was extremely fulfilling to watch visitors (children and adults alike!) enjoy getting up close and personal with our inflatables. We encouraged people to walk through the mouth of the sea monster and feel the teeth brush their arms, or duck under the arch-shaped tentacle. Overall, this was a very fun and whimsical project that I really enjoyed putting together!