If I should describe the Borås there are three things which quickly come to my mind.
Sculptures, wall paintings and textile.

Borås is situated one hour by express bus from Göteborg. When you arrive by bus or train you are already in centre! Centre of the city is easy to walk around. First what you notice is a nice park bordered by a river. Few streets with shops and restaurant. A square with town hall which is Oldest building in the Borås.

Around whole city there are numerous sculptures. Very tall pinocchio, buddha meditating in the river or lonely standing kid. Another aspect why Borås has rich rich cultural life and vibrant centre are wall paintings. This street art paintings are made by different artists. Till now there are 10 houses spreading across the city with painted walls. These paintings are part of the No limit event.

No limit Street art

Textile

Symbol of the Borås are two sheep-shearing scissors. A tribute to the vast number of smiths in the town in early history. In the past this city was considered as textile capital of Sweden. Little bit out of centre are many warehouses and former textile factories now used for exhibitions or as a museums.

Textile fashion centre includes textile museum, conference hall, textile university laboratories

During my stay I haven’t visited textile museum but I had a privilege to visit university labs of textile engineering program which students use here. I found out that they have very modern facilities and hi-tech machines and equipment.

Stina, student I met through Couchsurfing showed me almost every lab and explained the long and complicated process how is from cotton made threads which are used for producing fabrics. They are able to produce for example waterproof jacket here from a scratch. Different testing and painting machines available make possible everything.

Raw cotton

Output

Stina was professional in producing threads. She showed me various raw cotton and than we tried to create a thread from semi product.

I was fascinated and my tech savvy nature was satisfied! Thanks Stina for this opportunity to sneak-peak into the process of producing clothes.

Color tones

Did it happen to you? You buy a piece of clothe. In the store it looks amazing. Than you go outside and suddenly it seems that it changed the tone of color?

One of the important aspects in designing and producing colorful textile is testing the color under different light sources. There was a device able to switch between different light sources. Do you see the bigger difference between colors in picture A and a slight change in picture B?