Perhaps you’ve been putting off your goal of learning about wearables because you just don’t have the patience for tutorials and prefer some real life interaction. Well, you can start the new year off with a bang since wearables star Birce Özkan will be at Manufacture New York for a series of workshops. You may remember Birce from our blog, creating nature inspired fashions including her Fall dress and Augmented Skirt. Her workshops will run for three consecutive Saturdays and start with basic electronics, leading to integrating circuits into garments. Here’s the format:

Part 1: Participants will be introduced to various fashion tech designers and examine their work to understand their methodology to use different sensors in their designs. An introduction to electronics, basic circuitry and microcontrollers will be followed by a soldering workshop.

Part 2: The second part will concentrate on learning about input and output systems for microcontrollers and how to read data from sensors. Different techniques will be shown including how to integrate interactive components into garments, how to select the best possible sensor to create reactive garments using LEDs and how to establish a simple but robust design pipeline to go from an idea to a functional garment prototype. With a choice of photocell or sound sensors, participants will design their own wearable technology piece with integrated circuitry.

Part 3: The last part will be dedicated to conceptualization and execution. Participants will solder their custom circuits and construct their interactive wearable piece. Last but not least, there will be an in­-class “fashion tech runway show” to celebrate achievements!

Birce has sent this video clip along of a project that will be shown in class–zippers can be fun!

Expect to have fun and meet others with a similar curiosity about fashion and tech. This is your chance to make a dream outfit and show it off to your friends, so check out the details and sign up here. If you want to get a jump on the workshops, pick up our book Getting Started With Adafruit FLORA. It has a lot of great tips on integrating microcontrollers with sensors into clothing, and it is all easier than you might expect. Just do it!

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!