House of Tea @38C3

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====== Fabric ======

**Discussion of different strategies.**

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===== Different varieties. =====

- symmetrical

- asymmetrical

- radial

===== Some general thoughts about the fabric. =====

Our space is in a corridor in front of the main hall. The height is around 3 m or a little bit above. The ceiling is made of plasterboard painted white. Spotlights are spread over the area. An orange-brown carpet gives a warmer atmosphere, but in general it looks like in a convention center. Which it is.

We want to create a roof structure to make it look more cozy. We plan to span cable wires between concrete pillars to hang in some colorful fabric.

The fabric is not allowed to block the sprinkler system. There needs to be gaps in between. And the fabric needs to be fireproof B1. One source could be this vendor: https://www.stoff4you.de/Stoffe/Schwer-entflammbar-B1/

And also it is important to not put too much weight onto the cables. We must choose lighter fabrics like Tüll, Taft or Satin.

* Tüll (en/fr: tulle) is cheap, see-through, net-like and is made from flame retardant material.

* Taft is cheap, opaque and still light.

* Satin is shiny and most colorful.

The fabric is available with a width of 1.40m.

The space we want to cover are 2 squares and a triangle. 1 square contains 2 triangles. That are 5 triangle units in total.

===== Squares =====

If we buy 90m of fabric, every unit will have 18m fabric available. 36m for a square.

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A square has a size of 8.66m x 7.38m which is around 64 m². Roughly 80% can be covered with the fabric. But we also must let it hang down at the sides or it will slip from the cables.

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A square is highly symmetrical. It has 2 mirror axes vertically and horizontally and 2 diagonally (if we ignore, that it really is a rectangle). Even when we don't do a regular pattern, tiling the area can be helpful to understand the dimensions beforehand.

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When we put one strip of fabric to one corner, we could put it symmetrically into the other corners, too. It may look random but it isn't completely. This picture shows how easy larger gaps can emerge when tiling irregularly.

36m of fabric cut into 4 equivalent pieces would equal to 9m of fabric for a quarter of the square.

1,40m of fabric can be sliced into 4 x 35cm strips. Less than we want and more than we might be officially allowed. But fabric will bend and curl, which results in the limited width in the end.

So for the whole square we have 4 x 4 strips with 9m x 35cm.

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The picture shows the fabric before the cloth modifier animated them.
The 4 x 9m strips start in one sector and cover a neighboring one. Equally to 8 x 4.5m strips for one sector.

We could cut the fabric differently and get 4 x 6 strips with 6m * 35cm.

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Or we cut 8 strips with 5.5m, 8 strips with 6m and 8 strips with 6.5m.

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The strips hang down with different length according to their position. We could use this as a deco element or we cut the pieces beforehand to the desired lengths.

===== Total Length =====

We can calculate with every length, it is just proportional. But cutting will be easier, if the ordered fabric will be of multiples of 6 or 9. 90 m would be easy to split into 5 colors each 18m long.