Geri Forkner is usually in Tennessee creating felted and woven works of art, but she recently traveled to Thailand to lead an e-textile workshop with fashion design students at Rangsit University. Here are some details of the glowing scarves and more photos can be seen at Weaving School.
I do a wet felting technique that laminates wool fibers to a base cloth. To put it simply, the wool fibers penetrate lightweight silk chiffon with the addition of water, soap, and agitation, and in the process, change the color and texture of the silk. The wool shrinks and the silk doesn’t, so there are lots of possibilities for creating unusual shapes. There are many fibers available to slide conductive yarns through for invisible stitching and ways to create pockets to hide batteries.
I’m just learning how to use micro-controllers in my work, but for folks who have never heard of wearable tech, I’m making it as accessible and easy as possible. I’m telling them what’s available and hope they will take it from there. So, for the Rangsit workshop, we used contact paper as a “battery holder”. The latest stainless steel conductive thread works great, so all the students ended up with a working LED stitched to their scarf. I showed them a demo piece I made with a micro-controller to show what else is available. I had an issue with the Arduino when I set up my project in their art gallery, so I tracked down an electronics shop near the school that had one in stock with an adapter that worked for Thailand electricity. The folks at the shop also knew all about Raspberry Pi — two of the few words I know in Thai now are “red” and “hair”. One of the women at the shop apparently watches Lady Ada’s videos.
I’ve taught this basic felted scarf workshop many times and no two scarves ever come out the same. This time was no exception. The results were spectacular.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!