During a trip to Nepal, I was very inspired by the bowls made of leaves used to serve momos on the street.
I
really liked the idea of re-using biodegradable material to make
something, so I wanted to experiment with using banana leaves as the
fiber for the composite this week. I got a bag of banana leaves
from a local grocery store and dried it in the oven to get rid of the
moisture. I've been advised that this would take the moisture out
of the leaves so the resin can be absorbed.
I
decided to make a laptop case. I made a mold out of foam and
wrapped it with aluminimum foil to prevent the composite from sticking.
Then I got to work with the composite. The problem with the
banana leaves is that it was so dried that it crumbled as soon as I
tried to dip them into the bucket of resin, or wrapped it around the
edge.
I
finally decided that I wasn't able to use the leaves and used the
original fabric instead. Aside from being messy, this was a
pretty straight forward process since the fabric absorbed the resin
extremely well. I tried to sneak pieces of leaves into the
composite to give it an organic look. Here's the following
product:
After
the mold came out, I spent some time in the Hobby Shop using the drill
to get the foam core out of the mold. It was a long and tedious
process breaking the core into small pieces to dig out, but I was
happy with the result.
