Softness, Week 12, Snowflake

For Seamless v.3 in Boston I submitted a work from Softness: Snowflake.
During the past week I have been preparing to build snowflake, partially
in preparation for the show if I am accepted, and as my two week
retrospective project for Softness.

I plan to continue to work with wearables, especially during the studio
next semester which I will be taking, so this past week I have spent
preparing for making snowflake and future wearable projects. The first
step was to purchase a decent sewing machine. I looked to Consumer
Reports to guide me, and found excellent advice on purchasing a machine.

I decided their top recommendation, the NX-450 would be a prime choice
so I set off to test it. Sew Fast Sew Easy is a store located
in the garment district which has an excellent selection of sewing machines to
play with. I spent an hour in their suite trying different machines with their
staff graciously teaching me how to use each. I eventually decided to purchase
the NX-450's sister, the PC-420 because of its extensive stitch collection,
auto-threading and auto-cutting capabilities.

Next I started searching for conductive thread. Leah Buechley has an
excellent selection of links. I decided on thread from Less EMF
because they seemed fast and reasonably priced. I'd really like to get my
hands on a selection of conductive thread to compare.

Finally, I have been preparing Illustrator templates to work with the
Lilypad and her components. I've found once you start sewing conductive
thread in fabric it SUCKS when you make a mistake. I plan on doing a
complete schematic for Snowflake and then actually build her next week.
I still need to figure out what I'm going to do for audio components.

The semester has been an exciting jumble of ideas and projects with a
variety of people. I have been introduced to several new mediums:
wearables, scents, and installations. These are areas which I will
continue to develop during my time at ITP. Most memorable was
working with everyone on the Jack In project, and Ithai on
Breathing Architecture.

-- Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:48 -0500

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