Textiles & Electronics

Through the magic of twitter I was introduced to Lynne Bruning. She weaves magic in the form of textiles and electronics. Given that I've twice researched this area I'm amazed I didn't find her before. She's a whizz with neon, nylon and pulses.

Added to that, this piece, Synaptic, is inspired by green flourescant protein; the nervous system; and cell imaging. A flick through my recent posts will show you how I feel just now about tiny scale science coming together with textiles. She describes it as "a Victorian raver blacklight evening coat" - brilliant! (Literally)

This is something I'd love to try more of myself, and though all her workshops on how to create your own conductive threads, fabrics and yarns seem to be in other countries, actually it's not that impossible. My local hackspace - Madlab - runs beginners courses in Arduino programming, which is a tiny computer board you can wire into fabrics to make it run instructions like switching led lights on and off - so if I ever have the time / money available I'm going to try and master this one, as a starting point.

You may already be familiar too, with Leah Buechley's work - probably the longest known textiles / arduino hacker; she helped develop the exceptionally appealing looking Lilypad Arduino, which was what first sparked my interest in this, around 3 or 4 years ago.

The future is *bright*