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!

First off, I wanted to mention that eTextile Tuesdays are picking up steam. Along with the eTextile Worksessions every other Tuesday at BrainSilo, Lynne Bruning is also hosting the eTextile Lounge: a global hackerspace every Tuesday night on uStream. So if you’re in Portland, come by the hackerspace to work, talk shop, and watch the ustream… and if not, jump on the ustream chat and participate from there!

Secondly, I seem to have picked up a new medium! I started needle felting earlier this year and I am totally smitten. I’ve been felting like a fiend, and playing with incorporating electronics into felted projects as well. The Starfield Fascinator at the top of this entry is a felted and beaded hair accessory that uses Aniomagic’s sparkle board to make the LEDs twinkle in various patterns – I hope to have video to post of it soon.

This is the Prince of All Cosmos, from Katamari Damacy, as rendered in wool.

The Prince of All Cosmos is a character from the wacky and much beloved Japanese video game Katamari Damacy – if you’ve played it, you’ll understand exactly why he’s standing behind that orange. He has a battery pocket in his back that works as a pressure switch, so the LED in his antenna lights up whenever his belly is squeezed. I’ve put up an instructable with everything you need to make your own, if you’re a fan. I did get a video of him, which you can take a look at below.

Bay Area Maker Faire has come and gone, as well – along with all of the awesome makers and made things, it was great to see the eTextile community pulling together there. I hope to see the group efforts continue and grow from here – for one, it’s really nice to be able to share booth-watching responsibilities with a group… being at Maker Faire without the chance to go look around is really a form of geek-torture!

Speaking of Maker Faires, fellow Cascadians should really check out the Vancouver BC Mini Maker Faire coming up June 25-26. I’ll be headed up to create an eTextile showcase, and I’ll be selling Sewing Electrified kits there, as well as potentially some finished works. It sounds like it’s going to be a ton of fun. Don’t let the ‘mini’ designation fool you – they’ve got 2 large buildings booked as well as outdoor space, so I’m sure there will be plenty to keep you in awe. I’m planning to debut 3(!) new LED embroidery kits there – and yes, that means that the contest winners will be announced soon! The designs are ready, but I’m making some additional upgrades to the kits – once I’ve got all my ducks in a row and the first set of new kits are ready to mail out, the announcement will go up.

Before I sign out, I should also mention that I’m looking to do more in the way of teaching. I’ve got a few things in the works, but if you’re aware of an organization or school that would like to host me to teach a class or workshop on sewn electronics, needle felting, or a combination thereof, drop me a line!

Now you can see the Skirt Full of Stars in action!

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…

Want your own?

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.

I’ve been working on this skirt for around a year now – you may remember the video I posted last spring of my proof of concept circuit. In the time since then I’ve created two other prototype skirts, which were great steps in my learning but didn’t end up working quite as I’d hoped. This one, however, made it though a full real-world test wear at last week’s Bassnectar concert with flying, or at least dancing, colors.

Here’s what that circuit from the video ended up turning into:

And here it is showing a different color as I move the accelerometer:

I sewed the circuit into a handmade tulle wrap skirt, then attached fiber optics to each of the LEDs and wove them through the lower layer of tulle.

I’m hoping to get some better pictures and some video of it this weekend, so stay tuned for more details.

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!

The Spirosketch set is a bangle bracelet and necklace, and also a fully functional drawing tool/toy. I’ve always been a fidgeter and doodler, and early this year I had the thought “Wouldn’t it be neat if there were a spirograph that you could wear and take around with you all of the time?” And then I set out to make it happen.

The first hurdle I faced was setting up the gearing in a way that wasn’t horribly uncomfortable around a wrist.  As you can see in the picture above, I ended up with an inner surface on the bracelet that is mostly smooth, with just enough teeth to keep things running cleanly when using it to draw.

Then I set my energy to coming up with an attractive design for the pendant. I wanted to make sure that there were a variety of hole positions so that it could create different designs, but I didn’t want to use the traditional positions from the original spirograph. I also needed to make sure that the holes were large enough to allow the tip of a standard pen to touch the paper through the 3mm thick plastic.

The largest number of iterations came in this step. I ended up with some rejected designs that looked sadly like checkers-pieces, lots that could only be used with super-fine-point pens, and others that looked and worked okay but were too symmetrical so all the holes made the same pattern. Eventually I hit on my final design, which I think does a pretty good job of being attractive and also functional – the innermost holes are just to continue the pattern, and won’t work with most pens, but most of them do work – as you can see from the variety of patterns made in the drawings on the top picture.

Want one? They’re available through my Ponoko showroom or my Etsy shop.

Oh gracious, my poor neglected blog! Techshop Portland got their laser cutter, and ever since then I’ve been spending most of my spare moments over there, and not writing much of anything longer than a tweet! (And yes, if you do want to hear from me a bit more often, you can do so by following @Spiralshannon, or subscribing to my twitter rss feed.)

So, anyway, things have been pretty exciting over here. I’ll be selling at Crafty Wonderland this Sunday – my first craft fair! I have a new set of designs based on work I’ve been doing with Context Free Art - software that allows you to create images by writing algorithms, and which  is pretty easy to learn if you have even the most basic programming background (which is all I have… I’ve done the barest touch of javascript coding, but I taught the “Advanced BASIC” class at a computer camp back in college.) I’ve only photographed one item out of the new set, and it was selected to appear in the promotional email for this weekend’s show, which has me a bit giddy.

There’s more to tell, but honestly I think I’ll have a better chance of getting back to posting regularly if I don’t force myself to sit here and write about it all right this minute. Besides, I have to finish getting everything ready for the craft show! So, if you’ll be in Portland on Sunday, come check out the show (11am to 4 pm at the Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside) and get to be among the first few people to see the rest of the new pieces. If not, sit tight and I’ll start posting them next week, and I promise I’ll be back to write more soon!

Lilypad Arduino prototype circuit from Shannon Henry on Vimeo.

(for more about what you are watching, see:  A working prototype!)

How exciting! Pictured here is a functioning prototype for the motion sensing skirt that I’ve been planning. It uses a Lilypad Arduino, a microcontroller board designed specifically for use in textile electronics. The lilypad board takes readings from an accelerometer (the small board in the upper right of the photo) and translates information about the movement it is sensing into different colors of light from the RGB LEDs at the bottom.

Ok, so I know this doesn’t translate all that well to a still photo. I tried to take a video of it working, but my little point and shoot doesn’t handle the LED very well for videos – they made streaks all over the screen. I’ll see if I can get over to my parents’ house tomorrow and talk my little sister into playing videographer for me, though. In the meantime, I’m off to work more on the final design.

I just got some great new jewelry posted over at my shop today. One of the great features of etsy (where I have my shop) is the focus on community. And one of the ways they have to build community is through the creation of ‘teams’ of sellers that have something in common – whether that be background, media, style, or anything else. I have joined two etsy teams so far… PDX Etsy (for people from the Portland area) and Mad Scientists of Etsy (for those with a background or day job in science or whose work draws on science.)

The Mad Scientists run a monthly challenge where they provide a topic and everyone who wishes creates something  that ties into that topic. The picture you’re looking at is one of my entries in the February challenge, which had the topic of Mycology. I had a couple of related ideas on this one, tried them all out, and liked them – so I ended up posting 3 separate items for the challenge. Two necklaces and one pair of earrings, all inspired by Amanita muscaria – the iconic toadstool also known as fly agaric.

This distinctive fungus pops up in all sorts of interesting cultural places, from the Super Mario Brothers 1-up mushroom, to Smurf houses, to fairy pedestals in European renaissance art. In my tributes, I combined elements of poplar that I had laser etched with an illustration of the gill pattern from Amanita muscaria with vivid red-and-white polka dotted lampwork beads and 14 karat gold-filled chain and toggle clasps. As I said, I really liked how they all turned out… the red and white is classic and fun, and even gives it a bit of retro-50s flair, in my opinion. What do you think?

I wrote previously about how inspired I was by the play about the life of Buckminster Fuller, and I mentioned that I was going to design some things in his honor. Well, I’ve just recently completed and posted the first few of those: the  Bucky ball pendant pictured here, and a tetrahedron pendant (if you are curious as to why a tetrahedron, go ahead and look at that page, I explain it there). I’m quite happy how they turned out, and have some related things in the works.

I was already about to post to mention that, when this happened:

That’s my pendant, featured on the front page of etsy — how exciting! Thanks, Bucky!

Here we are, almost halfway through January of 2009 – how did that happen so soon?

We had a lovely holiday, all things considered. Portland got more snow in the last few weeks of December than we generally get in 1-2 years, at least. As this city is prepared to deal with rain far better than snow (after all, we generally get an inch or less at a time, one to two times a year, so it’s not usually much of an issue) everything more or less shut down.

So I ended up housebound with Sean for about a week, and we absolutely made the most of it. He works nights, so we generally get limited time together because of the schedule mismatch. But with a week and a half at home, I was able to switch my schedule around to nights  - I’m quite a natural night owl myself, so it was nice not to have to fight it for a while.

We decided to give almost entirely handmade or self-designed gifts this year. I think the only purchased present we gave was some microdistilled brandy and raspberry liqueur that we picked up for Sean’s dad this summer while taking a tasting tour at the Brandy Peak distillery on the southern Oregon coast. I also designed a handful of custom laser cut keychains, ornaments, and jewelry items for other gifts, knit one hat, and we made the Kahlua and two different flavors of infused vinegars pictured above.

The Kahlua was Sean’s idea, months and months ago. We got a recipe from someone he works with who makes it occasionally, but the recipe called for instant coffee, and that was just not going to fly in our java-soaked household. We drink a lot of coffee, and we like the good stuff, so we weren’t about to go out and pick up something we wouldn’t drink ourselves to make gifts for our friends and family. So I flexed my google-fu a bit and came up with this recipe, using toddy coffee.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t tried toddy coffee, you should! It’s a cold-brew method that involves soaking very coarsely ground coffee beans in cold water for 12 hours. You end up with a coffee concentrate that you then dilute with water, milk, cream, etc to make your drinks (for hot drinks, you can either mix with hot water or heat in the microwave once diluted) . Because no heat is applied, the compounds that can make coffee acidic and bitter don’t get pulled into the drink, and the taste is closer to how coffee smells. You can get cold-brew coffee makers that include a large container for brewing, filters, and a carafe for around $30-40 (this is what we have), but it’s an easy process and would lend itself pretty easily to pulling together your own system from things around the house if you were so inclined. We use ours a ton, especially for iced coffees in the summer.

Anyway, back to the topic – I also wanted to talk a bit more about the vinegars we made. I decided on two different flavors – Scarborough Fair (yep, that would be parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme) and Pesto (basil and garlic). I made the pesto with plain distilled vinegar, and put a bunch of garlic cloves and fresh basil in to soak. The Scarborough Fair was made from a mix of distilled and red wine vinegars, with a combination of dried and fresh herbs. Both of them were set up in gallon jugs and left alone to sit and infuse for about 5 weeks, then I strained out the herbs by pouring the mix through a fine mesh strainer. That worked perfectly for the fresh herbs, but the dried ones ended up with some little bits that made it through the strainer, so I popped a coffee filter into the funnel I was using to fill the bottles and got rid of the rest that way.

For some added visual appeal, I put a couple of fresh herb sprigs into the S.F. bottles, and each of the pesto bottles got one of the garlic cloves that had already been soaking in the mixture. If you’re going to do that, you want to make sure that whatever you leave in the bottle can stand up to the vinegar (the main infusing time is a good place to check this). Garlic does fine, as do the woodier herbs, but leafier ones like basil and up breaking down to a bit of a goo – which is not a problem when infusing, but would end up making the final product pretty unattractive if you put it in then. As a bonus, we have a bag of slightly basil flavored pickled garlic cloves in the fridge now, as there were more of them than bottles. Yum!