This winter has been particularly chilly in New York City, and while at the Textile Arts Center we have all been trying to keep warm at our looms, it is no surprise that Bloom Blankets have caught our eye. Unique in shape and style, the tessellated surface of the blanket blossoms with elements of origami and comfort.
Bloom Blanket creator, Bianca Costanzo
Creator Bianca Costanzo’s Bloom Blankets started out as a Kickstarter project that has now become the most successful campaign in Spain. It was not until after recovering from a nearly fatal bicycle accident and relearning many life skills that she began to rediscover old hobbies. During this period of time, Bianca found herself making origami that her mother taught her as a child. Now much older, these simple folds of paper became more and more complex and greater consideration was placed on the mathematical elements of final results. With these creations, Bianca soon began looking to the ideas of Ron Resch, an applied geometrist and artist who is widely known for his larger-than-life paper tessellations and polyhedrons. Combining her knowledge of mathematics, her love of art and her memories, it was not long before Bloom sprouted into existence.
Ron Resch, 1939-2009
The memories stitched into the blanket go back even further than her childhood origami. When asked about the process of translating the conceptual design of Bloom from paper to fabric, Bianca recalled her days at her grandfather’s furniture factory in Sao Paulo, “I have many childhood memories of wandering the production areas and finding places to hide in and around rolls of fabric. It might have been there that textiles established themselves in my mind as a language with which to express my ideas.” With the combination of memory and geometric elements such as polyhedrons, the artistically appealing quality of the blanket comes naturally. The connected pyramidal surface interacts and joins together just as effortlessly as nature unfurls itself. The natural process of growing and ideas ‘blooming’ are represented in the patterns and connections of the tessellated surface.
The surface of Bloom is composed of 180 triangles of handpicked wool-cashmere blended fabric. We know what you’re thinking: wool-cashmere? That’s one soft blanket! Not only does this fabric ensure maximum warmth for these next few cold months, it also maintains the perfect balance of lightness and rigidity that ensures the everlasting shape of Bloom’s surface. The material chosen for a project such as Bloom is vital to the success of the three-dimensional aspect of the creation. Upon purchasing one of the blankets, you can truly watch the blanket come to life, as it laid out on a flat surface, rising up and regaining its natural shape.
Bianca is continuing to explore the artistic application of origami, and hopes to start looking into kinematics as well, to begin to further understand how geometry can play a role in motion. We can’t wait to see what she creates from her discoveries!
Learn more about Bianca, the story behind Bloom Blanket, or purchase your own here.
Images courtesy of Bloom Blanket.
Image of Ron Resch provided by ronresch.org.
