Union of Striped Yarns by Dienke Dekker

People always ask us which design fair is on our can’t-miss list, and though we’ve never been able to make it there ourselves, we’re inclined at this point to say Dutch Design Week. The work on show there is consistently kind of epic, with future design superstars springing almost fully formed each year from the Design Academy Eindhoven (see Formafantasma, Julien Carretero, and Nacho Carbonell, to name a few). Next on that list might be Dienke Dekker, a 2012 graduate whose material explorations we’re featuring today. For her project the Union of Striped Yarns, which debuted at last year’s DDW, Dekker used a variety of yarns — hand-dyed, industrial-printed and even non-traditional “threads” like caution tape — to explore striped patterning in textiles.

Different colored and white spaces, combined with a variety of weaving methods, created the gorgeous effects on view here. “By influencing the basic element of a textile, the individual characters of the products are defined,” writes Dekker. “The collaboration of the yarns and the different ways of interweaving them results in complex repetitions and sequences, seemingly random overall effects and intriguing color-plays. The achieved patterns are not always directly comprehensible, but the loose ends of the textiles unveil some of the mystery.” Scroll through for more of this project, then click here to read more about this up-and-coming talent.