I’m elbow deep in packing, but taking a quick break to drop by and let you know that I’ll be on the road for about 2 weeks.  As I won’t be able to ship orders out, the shop will be closed until the week of July 12th.

I’ll be capping this trip off with a visit to one of my absolute favorite craft shows – Urban Craft Uprising. If you’re in the Seattle area, I highly recommend stopping by the exhibition hall at Seattle Center on July 10th or 11th. UCU consistently has fantastic vendors, interesting demos and author visits, and just a generally great, fun vibe, so I’m thrilled to be headed back for my third show with them.

If you make it to the show, stop by my booth and say hi!

In honor of Lady Ada, I’d like to highlight a handful of the women who inspire me in the world of wearable electronics and soft circuitry.

Leah Buechley

Director of the High-Low Tech research group at the MIT Media Lab, Leah developed the Lilypad Arduino – the microcontroller boards I’ve been using in my own wearable electronics experimentation. It’s a dream of mine to someday be involved with her lab – they come up with incredible, innovative, and beautiful things there!

LED Bracelet - Leah Buechley, 2005

Hannah Perner-Wilson

One of the graduate research assistants in Leah Buechley’s lab, Hannah has developed some incredible resources for others interested in wearable electronics, including the reference site HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT (with Mika Satomi) and a bunch of Instructables.

Knit & Crocheted Sensors - Hannah Perner-Wilson, 2009

Diana Eng

You may recognize Diana’s name from her stint on Project Runway a couple of years ago. She’s still going strong with wearable technology -  most recently authoring Fashion Geek and creating Fairytale Fashion, a collection with electronics and shape-changing garments which integrated feedback from the public through her website during the design process. For extra geek points, she also covers ham radio for Make magazine!

Twinkle Dress and EL Wire Dress - Diana Eng, 2010

Syuzi Pakhchyan

Syuzi wrote Fashioning Technology, the first book that I picked up on the subject of soft circuitry, and runs a community by the same name. Syuzi is great about encouraging more people to experiment in the field – the Fashioning Tech community is very welcoming, and she regularly shares the projects that members blog about there.

ePuppets - Syuzi Pakhchyan, 2008

Alison Lewis

Alison is the founder of SWITCH and author of SwitchCraft. She also teaches at the Parsons School of Design, and brings a more high-fashion perspective to her work. I was incredibly flattered when she recently featured my Skirt Full of Stars on SWITCH.

Rodarte-style Lighted Heels - Alison Lewis, 2010

Becky Stern

Becky may have done more to spread the word of DIY soft circuitry than anyone else. As Associate Editor at MAKE and CRAFT, she frequently shares wearable tech projects and has produced a couple of CRAFT videos about wearables. She also teaches soft circuit workshops (I had to miss the one at Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle last summer because I didn’t have anyone else working my booth), and sells soft circuit starter kits through her company, Sternlab.

Lilypad Embroidery - Becky Stern, 2008

Lynne Bruning

‘Textile Enchantress’ Lynne makes absolutely stunning garments that frequently involve things like electronics or UV-reactive materials. She has also generously shared quite a few instructables of soft circuitry techniques. I’m particularly fascinated by the work she’s been doing using smart fashion to assist impaired individuals – like this sonar garment for the visually impaired.

Bats Have Feelings Too - Lynne Bruning, 2009

Angela Sheehan

Creator of the blog Soft Circuit Saturdays, Angela is another maker who has been diving deeply into wearable electronics. I love seeing what another dedicated explorer who is not a professional in the field comes up with!

Temperature Sensing Cup Sleeve - Angela Sheehan, 2009

Interested in seeing more posts honoring women in science and tech? Check out the list of posts over at Finding Ada, or follow the #ald10 tag on twitter.

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.

I really like these Emission Spectra scarves from Becky Stern. I’ve actually been kicking around an emission spectrum bracelet idea for about six months now, but the picture I have in my head requires metalworking skills and tools I don’t have. Seeing this makes me want to revisit the idea, though, and try to find another means of interpreting it.

I was also really intrigued by the ideas from Fabian Hemmert’s TEDx talk on ways a mobile device could provide information kinesthetically. I’m not so sure I’d want a “breathing” mobile, but changing the center of mass seems like it could be a really useful way of providing output. (via information aesthetics)

I just discovered Not So Humble Pie, who came up with these fabulous misfortune cookies. She also recently did a couple of awesome science cookie roundups.

N Building, in Tokyo, is a concept building with an interesting augmented reality twist. Instead of putting up signs, the building facade is a QR code; reading it on a mobile device delivers you to a website with a tenant list and other information.The developers also created an iPhone application that allows building occupants to interact with passersby through their phones -- showing what’s behind the windows, overlaying speech bubbles, and the like. (via Rhizome)

I can’t imagine anything like this taking off if every building had its own separate app, but I could definitely envision it integrated into a product like Google Maps.

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.

Last fall, Sean and I received a jar of P.B. Loco Curry Peanut Butter from my mom, who was right on in thinking that it was very much up our alley.

After we’d shared a couple of delicious snacks of curry peanut butter with apple slices, I was struck by a grocery-store inspiration! I saw chocolate chips on the shelf and decided to give some candy making a try. After all, peanut butter and chocolate is an old stand-by, the curry peanut butter was tasty, and I’ve had the good fortune to have tried a couple of really good curry-chocolate combinations, so why not put all three together?

I brought home a couple of bags of the white and dark chocolate chips, and got to experimenting. I used a little over half the jar of our curry peanut butter on the first batch, and they turned out great! Got a few odd looks when offering them to friends, but most people were willing to give it a try – and just about everyone who tried them liked them.

But the only P.B. Loco store that I’m aware of is in a mall in Scottsdale, and I’m in Portland. And we wanted to make more – without asking my mom to go to the mall and mail us more peanut butter. So it was back to the kitchen to work out a recipe using only ingredients I could find in my local grocery store. Fortunately, it only took a few tries to get it right – and I can’t say it was a hardship for Sean and I to eat the mistakes.

This final version ended up pretty much just as I was hoping – rich and smooth and just a touch spicy, with some nice texture from the peanut bits and a good balance of flavors that leaves a great taste in your mouth after eating them. Without further ado, here’s the recipe!

Ingredients:

1.5 12-oz bags dark chocolate chips*
1     12-oz bag white chocolate chips*
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
1.5 Tbsp curry powder
Cinnamon for dusting

Rectangular cake pan or other deep-sided pan
2 Microwave safe bowls (one for dark chocolate, one for white chocolate mixture)

*Chocolate chips are ideal because they don’t need to be tempered. If you want to try this with chocolate bars, melting wafers, or some other initial form of chocolate, you’ll need to temper the chocolate to make sure it solidifies well and doesn’t end up covered quickly with powdery white bloom. More on how and why to temper chocolate here.

Melting chocolate in a microwave:

I used a microwave for chocolate melting instead of a double boiler because it’s quite a bit faster, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally getting water in the chocolate and making it seize. Here’s the basic procedure:

1. Empty your chocolate chips into a microwave safe bowl – I actually used a glass measuring cup.
2. Microwave for 30 seconds on 50% power. Remove and stir as best you can – the chocolate will likely still be pretty solid at this point.
3. Microwave another 30 seconds on 50% power, then stir again. Repeat until the chocolate is smoothly melted. Make sure you are actually pulling the chocolate out and stirring at each interval – the stirring is very important, as it spreads the heat throughout and allows more of the chocolate to melt at each step. If you don’t stop and stir, you could end up burning your chocolate before you think it’s melted. Also note that different types of chocolate will melt differently – the white chips, for example, not only melt faster than the dark chocolate but also to a more liquid consistency.

Making the candy:

1. Line  pan with aluminum foil.
2. Melt 3/4 bag of dark chocolate chips.
3. Pour the melted chocolate into pan and spread evenly across the bottom. Shake the pan gently a few times to help the layer even out.
4. Place pan with chocolate layer into the refrigerator for 2-5 minutes (optional, allows for easier spreading of the next layer, but may increase the likelihood of layers splitting later on.)
5. Melt 1 bag of white chocolate chips.
6. Mix peanut butter and curry powder into melted white chocolate until evenly distributed.
7. Pour the peanut butter mixture into pan and spread evenly over the bottom chocolate layer. Shake the pan gently again.
8. Place pan back into refrigerator for 2-5 minutes
9. Melt remaining dark chocolate chips
10. Pour melted chocolate into pan and spread evenly. Shake pan gently again.
11. Dust with cinnamon
12. Place pan into refrigerator to cool. Once cooled and solidified, remove candy from the pan, peel off the aluminum foil, and slice into bite-sized pieces. I found that a pizza cutter  worked really well to cut through the dense chocolate.

Store in refrigerator, or in freezer and allow to warm before serving. Makes lots – be ready to share!

To start, I’d like to direct your attention to fellow Mad Scientists of Etsy team member FurWillFly, whose creations include “The Insiders,” a family of plushies which each feature one anatomical feature, like this friendly-looking guy:

Large Lungs by FurWillFly

GIANTmicrobes turns out cuddly versions of the very small – from dust mites to platelets. We had some of their diseases around the office a few years ago, and everyone took no end of pleasure in giving each other the flu, flesh eating disease, and even the clap!

Penicillin by GIANTmicrobes

And if the single-celled isn’t small enough for you, I also recently discovered ParticleZoo, who makes adorable plush subatomic particles. They’re available singly, or in sets like the Universe in a Box, and she’s gone so far as to weight them by relative mass!

Charm Quark by Particle Zoo

Did all that cute make you feel like crafting your own plush scientific goodness? Perhaps you should take a look at this plush cell model instructable.

I’ve run across some really neat things that people have done with it, and I’m rather fascinated. It looks like it can do some pretty powerful (and attractive!) data crunching:

Flickr tag visualization by Smilehyun

Perhaps more inspiring for those of us who are dipping our toes in for the first time, however, is the ability to do some really interesting things with it using very short programs.

Miniature IV: White flower by Algirdas Rascius

Other than that elegant Flickr tag visualization up there, these images all come from the OpenProcessing Tiny Sketch pool – a collection limited to programs that weigh in at no more than 200 characters!

Last fall, OpenProcessing paired up with Rhizome, an organization that works to promote art works that engage technology, for a Tiny Sketch contest. The winner was a rather zen little game called Driving Through Iceland, by dotlassie.

Image from Driving Through Iceland

More Tiny Sketches can be found either at the closed archive of contest submissions or this open collection of sketches that meet the 200 character limit. I’ve been pretty amazed by the sorts of things people have pulled off within that limitation.

Sierpinski 2001 by Martin Schneider

Today I took the first step and downloaded the Processing software. Hopefully before too long I’ll be able to report back with  some examples from my experimentation.

Interested in learning a bit of Processing yourself? There are lots of resources out there – these lists of books and tutorials seem like good starting points.

Made with "A Slow Walk" by Leonardo Solaas

Seed Pod Coaster, unfinished

I started off this weekend with my first ever actual woodworking class over at Techshop Portland. They’ve just started splitting the drum sander into its own class  – apparently people weren’t cleaning up after themselves and were blowing through sandpaper strips like nobody’s business, and occasionally setting their projects on fire!

I’ve been wanting to learn how to use more of the power tools and woodworking equipment over at Techshop anyway, and I’ve just started playing a bit with using the laser cutter to do veneer inlays – a process that stood to be seriously sped up by the ability to do a quick and accurate finish sanding after gluing in the inlay. So when the drum sander class showed up in a time that fit my schedule, I jumped!

The class was great – not only did I get to learn the drum sander, but as the person teaching me had seen the sorts of things I do on the laser cutter, he also showed me how to use the band saw and planer to make nicely finished thin wood stock, like I use for my jewelry, out of larger pieces of lumber – awesomeness!

Now I just have to decide which class is next on my own personal agenda… more woodworking? The vinyl cutter? Maybe metal casting… hmmm.