SPRANGDAL
Individual project
Fall 2019
Materials: cotton yarn, dense foam, chipboard, polyester thread, polyester shoelace
The name Sprangdal comes from the combination of the words sprang + sandal. Sprang is an ancient way of creating textiles that have stretch. The elasticity of the fabric comes from the way the threads are interlaced. The technique requires stretching the threads with tension between two fixed points. While sprang has been around for centuries and has been found all over the world, it is not a popular form of large scale textile manufacturing because to this day it can only be done by hand.
In order to understand the way sprang stretches, I practiced the technique on various materials. Including:
Bread
Hair
Polyester Ribbon
Spaghetti
This exploration proved that almost any material could be made horizontally stretchy by using sprang. With this information, I decided to create a shoe However, since the sprang was only stretchy horizontally, I knew it would take multiple pieces to comfortably encase one's foot.
The final result was a sandal that used 3 pieces of sprang cotton yarn sewn together.
