Depending on what you’re wearing, unexpected downpours can be real outfit ruiners. Rather than block the drops, Dutch designer Aliki van der Kruijs used them to make natural patterns on specially-treated silk scarves.
She developed a special technique she dubbed “pluviagraphy,” using a film coating on the fabric to capture “photographic recordings” of precipitation (thankfully, she didn’t need some kind of crazy acid drizzle…), then set up a little workshop on the roof of her Amsterdam studio.
Patterns appear when the raindrops on the textile connect it to a film that’s laid out beneath it.
Each garment gets a note with time it was made and the weather conditions that day, making it a kind of tactile and visual marker of a particular moment in time and place — and a super-subtle, quite stylish bit of data viz.
She’s got some beautiful images on her tumblr, and the actual series is limited but you can order a handkerchief, shawl, or tie here. [Made by Rain]