Last year I had the good fortune to stay with Amy Crook of Antemortem Arts and Not Dead Yet Studios while I was attending the CCE West conference. We quickly discovered that our senses of humor, aesthetic, and geekiness meshed well, and set to scheming on a collaborative effort. The first fruits of that collaboration are here, and you can now preorder either (or both!) of our horror-tinged necklaces for March delivery: Continue Reading →
It has become fully apparent that if you want to keep up on what I’m making in anything approaching real-time, you should be following me on twitter (if you’re a non-tweeter, you can follow this RSS feed instead). It’s so much quicker to toss out a link there, and I’m way more sporadic about writing on the blog. However, I’ve got a lot to share, so I decided I should finally come post an update over here! Continue Reading →
Update: A tutorial with instructions to make your own Skirt Full of Stars is now posted at StarSkirt.PolymathDesignLab.com
In case you haven’t seen my last post about it, this is a hand-sewn tulle wrap skirt with integrated fiber optics and lights that change color in response to the speed and direction of the wearer’s movement.
It uses the Lilypad Arduino platform, developed for integrating electronics into textiles. There’s a purple organza underlayer to the skirt onto which is sewn the Lilypad main circuit board and a power supply, and an accelerometer hangs from a ribbon to allow for freedom of movement. The Lilypad receives the measurements of the accelerometer’s movement, and translates them into color output for the tricolor LEDs around the waistband of the skirt.
I used sparkle fiber optic cable to cut the harsh quality that you can get when using LEDs and distribute the light more evenly throughout the skirt. In previous prototypes I had simply created a line of LEDs swirling around the skirt, and this makes for a far more subtle and wearable effect.
I have to say, getting decent video of this skirt was quite a challenge! Too much light and the fiber optics didn’t show up on camera, too little and nothing showed up at all. Even this isn’t an accurate representation of what it looks like in person – the camera mostly just picks up the points of light from fiber optics pointed directly at it, where in person you can see them all around the skirt. But hopefully it at least gives a decent idea of how the whole thing works…
It looks like I’ll be making another of these soon, so I plan to take more photos of the construction process and post the instructions here as I go.
If you’re not feeling the yearning to jump into making wearable electronics yourself but you still want your own, send me an email at shannon@polymathdesignlab.com. I had a lot of fun creating this and would be thrilled to make some as custom projects.
Hooray, Hooray – it’s finally done!
Introducing my ‘Skirt Full of Stars’ – an interactive, illuminated skirt using the Lilypad Arduino – a microcontroller board designed for textile use. The skirt incorporates an accelerometer to measure the wearer’s movement, and the ‘stars’ change color based on that movement.
After months of tweaking my design, I was finally able to launch my Spirosketch jewelry sets last weekend at Urban Craft Uprising, and I’m so excited! Continue Reading →
