Christmas is over, but that doesn’t stop the fascination with ugly sweaters, especially with New Year’s Eve around the corner. This sweater is the perfect choice for a countdown in Times Square with its scrolling display that can be used for text or simple images. XTronical is the maker for this ugly delight and offers a video tutorial as well as instructions on his site for putting it together. He’s using an Arduino Nano with a LED matrix of 4 modules (MAX 7219 driver chip). The matrix is simply inserted into the lining of the sweater, which is then stitched to create a pocket. If your sweater does not have a lining, you could also use stitchable velcro to hold it in place or just add a piece of fabric to make your own pocket. If you’d like to learn more about how to work with LED matrices, check out our learning guide for the Matrix FeatherWing. This is a cute 8×16 matrix that allows two small LED panels to work together along with a Feather microcontroller. So, you can scroll like the best of them!

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!