My mother taught me how to sew. When I was little she would make fun mother-daughter costumes for us, my favorite being a Little House on the Prairie duo, complete with bonnets! When I was 18, I started teaching myself how to sew dresses from vintage patterns and bed sheets. Twenty dresses later, I felt confident enough to sew and sell my work through Etsy. I had a great time selling on Etsy, I sold my dresses and vintage clothing to boutique stores and people all over the globe.
In 2014 I found the Fabrication Laboratory at Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab. They had a broken embroidery machine, my friends at the lab and I were able to take it apart and fix it. Once it was fixed I learned how to use a simple digitizing software and started embroidering the crap out of stuff. My first patch was a picture of Sir David Attenborough kissing a cockatiel. I love that guy, always sitting on animals, or they’re sitting on him!
Anyways, digital embroidery (designing a patch and stitching it) was so much fun, it started getting included in the makerspace classes held at the lab, through the University of Illinois. It grew from an itty bitty corner in the ‘kitchen’ of the lab, to 20 machines, a much larger space, snuggled right up next to the 3D printers.
It was so successful, the machines and software were implemented in a new Fab Lab in Togiak, Alaska, Peoria and southern IL makerspaces, and last I heard, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago(the Wanger Family Fab Lab specifically). While digital embroidery was gathering momentum I was fortunate to have received my diploma through Fab Academy, an intensive course based off of MIT’s How to Make Almost Anything, instructed by Neil Gershenfeld. Fab Academy was fun and challenging, each week, we would receive a lecture on our assignment, and then proceeded to complete it; molding and casting, 3D printing, laser/vinyl cutting, designing, milling, and programming a circuit board…I’m very grateful to our local instructor, Mercedes Mane, an alum of Fab Academy, and co-founder of the Product Manufactory. She was very patient and a great source of knowledge to me and my four classmates! Receiving my diploma the summer of 2015, at Fab11, the annual conference (that year) hosted at MIT in Boston was also an incredibly rewarding experience. It was amazing to see MIT’s robotics museum, a silk 3D printer, and get connected with other Fab Lab folks. We even brought 10 embroidery machines to the week long conference, so we would have to opportunity to share the digital embroidery making with other labs! Once embroidery was mastered, I started playing around with sewable LEDs, conductive thread, and spandex.
The lab made a great playground for my ferrofluid experiments, forrays in nitinol, and silly electronics projects. I owe a lot of thanks to Colten Jackson, my best friend from high school, and fellow lab mate, who was patient in teaching me how to use Arduino and the myriad of microcontrollers you can use with them. Virginia McCreary, another good friend and lab mate, was also very supportive! Here is a silly video of us presenting our Fab Lab Final Projects.
My very first interactive piece was a collaboration with Colten, involving embroidery, a makey-makey, and pure data, we call it the celeste, short for celestial orchestra. I’ll add more to this later but for now, I just want a site besides my resume for my recent projects, so here’s a video and picture dump! :) Thanks for reading!
Test of Conductive Spray Paint/Magnets
Turn Signal Backpack (presented @FabLearn @ Stanford 10.16 woohoo!)
