I am a storyteller, designer, learner, researcher, and an educator. I tend to lean towards projects that are based in understanding someone’s story and communicating that to create new conversation that could perhaps spark change. My design process is heavily dependent on research and learning and my design goal is to educate from my findings.

Favorite tool- Markers and a blank page. Markers are so colorful and expressive and there’s so much possibility with a blank page.

So this week, I tried KNITTING! I knew nothing about it and found myself lost in the yarn section at Michaels. My original goal was to make a massive knit blanket with chunky yarn, but a gut feeling told me to calm down and buy a book for beginners before I . So, I bought a book called KNITTING FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS and found myself struggling to tie the first slip knot.  

After some struggling with a helpful DT classmate, Aine, I was able to learn how to cast on a few stitches. Casting on, from what I understand, is basically making some stitches. See below.

So, this was knitting. Nowhere in my book did I find an explanation for what do even do next, so I started randomly googling “what to do after you cast on- knitting.” Then, I found this gem on youtube.

So here’s the result of that:

and after many hours, this is what I have:

A few thoughts:

I LOVED KNITTING!!!! It was so fun and relaxing. The hardest part was getting the knots right, so asking for help was crucial as well as some googling. Once I got going, I felt a lot better and quickly picked it up. I obviously have a rough start with some missing stitches, but I still feel hopeful about picking it up more as I do it.

One thing: knitting is time consuming. I love doing it and consider it a very zen activity that I want to continue, but I need to scale my ideas of massive knit blankets down a tad.

My first iteration of this project was inspired by the LED throwies shown in class, but in this case I wanted to make discs made with foam and cotton fabric and let it be a toy where two or more people could play with. Then, I could not make the disc fly well enough without the battery, LED light and wired inside so I decided to make little pillow-shaped object with wires hanging on the outside for easily changing batteries and/or LEDs. Inside the pillows I made a sandwich circuit with two pieces of foam holding a piece of cotton knitted onto copper fabric and in the middle a piece of foam with a hole in the middle that would break the circuit unless the pillow was pressed to create a contact between the two pieces of copper fabric.

Reading Sensor Values

Swatch Exchange: Sensors

I personally had fun with this because I learned how to sew!

I decided to make a simple button based on the example our instructor showed us in class. She used foam, velostat, alligator wires, an LED, and a 9V battery.

I thought about doing something similar with the conductive thread. But since I was a first-time sewer, I didn’t have time to figure out how to work the conductive thread. Instead, I went for a simple 3V coin battery and LED circuit combination.

I made a circuit sandwich with two pieces of foam and stitched fabric. I put the button inside and essentially sewed up a light-up pillow.

For this week’s homework, I made an ice cream sandwich button as a swatch. While my original intent was not geared at food, I thought the velostat on foam aesthetic looked a lot like an ice cream sandwich.

I used foam and two layers of velostat. The video at the bottom of the post demonstrates the button working!

video documentation

In class assignment

Homework 2

Illustration – Itsy Bitsy Spider from Alonso Castro on Vimeo.

I first wanted to try the homework illustrating itsy bitsy spider using graphite powder, but realized that the amount of powder used for it to be able to be conductive would have to be a full bag of it. Then, noticed it was very resistive used in small amounts.

I decided to then draw the song and connect a battery (the sun) to an LED light (on the tip of the umbrella) using copper tape.