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There is yet more progress on the fight for life. It was, I must say, arduous work.

I spent a day setting up a shift register to place on the dress. A challenge that I encountered was that using fabric and conductive thread makes my workspace an inherently 2-D surface. I could not overlap the threads since that would create a connection. However, to hook up one LED driver to another, I needed a 3-D space, because there was not way to arrange the thread so that it would not, at some point, have to cross. Thus, I determined that, for the “spine” of my dress, where the LED drivers are linked together, I would use wire wrap, since it is still thin, light weight, and flexible but insulated. The connections to the LEDs, then, would be with conductive thread, but the connections between the LED drivers would be with wire wrap. Thus, I spent the day soldering wire wrap to a shift register and making the LED prongs into loops for conductive thread to run through.

Yesterday, I finally decided on the dimensions of the dress (20×20in) and the spacing of the LEDs (2.5 in). Then came the actual work.

It is a sad, sad day when a girl can’t get her hands on sewing scissors. I don’t know exactly what sad fate that foretells, but foretells it does. Yesterday I had to quest to the local K-Mart of buy sewing scissors and colored pencils. With scissors in hand, I cut out my pattern. Actually, a lot of it was ripping out my pattern since I wanted straight lines. Regardless!

Once I had my fabric cut, I spent a great deal of time ironing it out until I realized the first major point that I had totally overlooked: when creating a piece of wearable technology, it is valuable to use fabric that does not require a hot iron to keep in a presentable form. Not that this is an irreparable problem for this project, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind for the future. Fortunately, this layer won’t be visible to the casual observer, so I am not terribly worried.

I then sewed the first seem for the dress, thus having it in a 2-D shape similar to what the final project would be like. The sewing was a hassel, though. I used the small machings in the Equipment Room. I do not think that words can express how much those machines suck. I consider myself to be a rather accomplished seamstress, but I could not, for the life of me, make a straight line with this machine. It is a joke, when this program has beautiful, large, flat panel screens along the wall that we don’t have decent machines for the students to use. If I had a lot of money and donated it to this department, I would do it with the mandate to buy new and better tools for the students.

After fuming over the useless machine for a while, I used color pencil to trace out a grid on the back of the fabric so that I knew where to place my LEDs. This took surprisingly long since fabric will shift, making it hard to have consistently parallel lines.

Finally, about at midnight, I got around to sewing the LEDs into place and connecting them to the driver. I only got 5 done since I wasn’t going to use that crappy machine again so I had to sew the circuit by hand. I was up till about 6AM, and would have kept going but I didn’t have the right cable to check if the circuit was working and I didn’t want to stay up working on something that I would have to take apart the next day.

Fortunately, I don’t have to take it apart. At least, not all of it. While one LED isn’t working, everything else is going well. This means I can forge ahead and attach more LEDs and drivers!

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