Woven & Embroidered Concrete

Girli Concrete is an R&D project for the Tactility Factory (a colloboration between Belford and Morrow) that fuses textiles with cement to create beautiful "soft" building surfaces. Traditional textile assembly techniques such as weaving and embroidery are used to create decorative textures on concrete panels.

Take a look at the images below. They are quite breathtaking — and an amazing example of a hybrid craft that merges two apparently disparate materials, textiles and concrete, to create something new.

Of course, when I saw these I immediately imagined decorative concrete panels embedded with conductive fabric and LEDs. That's the DIY weekend challenge for anyone willing to take it on :-) Here's a tutorial on how to pour your own concrete counter to get you started. If you check out the Girli Concrete Blog, you will find lots of process photos that may help you figure out just how they embed the textiles into the concrete.