Road Safety Project!

Do you know anyone aged between 9-16? Want to help me with my latest project? Please send them the link below to my project survey which aims to help me to design road safety gear for young people.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YSGV7LV

2807 people under 16 years old were seriously injured or killed on Britain's roads in 2008. More than 60% of these accidents happened because they didn't look properly or couldn't be seen by road vehicles...

I will be using a combination of textiles and electronics to design a range of items that could be used to help young people to be seen better and to stay safe. If you have any ideas, opinions or comments feel free to contact me, I'd very much appreciate it. You could leave a comment here, or email me.

=D

Electrotextiles!

My current project for Uni is all about electro-textiles and creating road safety gear for children/teenagers. It's proving to be immensely interesting, horrendously easy to get side tracked and ridiculously hard to think up something that doesn't already exist... The world of material technology is ever fascinating so here are a few interesting projects =D

 

The M-dress mobile phone, no more missing calls because you have no pockets in your dress! You put the sim card into a slot in the dress and your dress becomes your phone... Missing someone? send them a bluetooth hug with the hug-shirt which uses bluetooth phone messaging to send a replication of your hug to someone you miss... Of course, I couldn't avoid a bit of knitting geekery, a scarf made using the encoding on a magnetic strip from a credit card, fed through a knitting machine.

To help us out with our electro-textile projects my tutor gave me these to play around with, a few bits and bobs from the PICaxe range. For whatever reason, she can't programme the wee chip in the middle so nothing would work.

I've figured out that, at the very least, the power supply and LED contacts and components work so the solder hasn't degraded. However, due to my Fruit I'm unable to actually programme anything! Mac's don't have the right data port for the conventional cable and don't support the recommended software, so I thought I was being all clever by using an ipod cable to link all the bits together and using a freeware download but apparently all you get is a surge of current, which shuts down your usb port... woops! It's a good thing Mac's are so clever and that i didn't just break everything. I'll have to try it tomorrow in the labs.

The idea ultimately is to create something for children/teenagers to wear to make them more visible when they are walking home from school/sports clubs. The biggest problem is coming up with something new that kids would actually wear.... The easiest bit is trawling the internet looking at loads of cool applications of electronics in clothing =D My Delicious page is now thoroughly plastered with silly links to fashion technology pages!

Meadows...

Hello =D

I've been working on crochet lately, partly because i was rubbish at it and i wanted to figure it out, and partly because I'm avoiding working on my latest portfolio for university... The upshot, is that after having figured out how to make crochet flowers, I have started a small meadow!

Some are in silk/merino blends, some are in bamboo, and some are in lambswool.

These are just a few examples, but they are growing by the second!

I experimented a little with size and petal density and i decided i like the little ones best. It's a very quick way to use up leftover yarn! so I'll probably be making lots more of these.

I also made some panels for a crochet cushion. The idea is to sew these onto a fabric cushion cover, but I think for the future I'll make an entirely crocheted cover and put this over a covered cushion filler instead. This was using a single skein of Rowan Colourscape in Autumn. I might have to get more of this and do a knitted cushion cover so you can see the colour progression horizontally as well!

Shop Update

I've been busy making things for Etsy lately, I put up a lot of badges last night and I made a few other things out of scraps.

I have these little beauties to go up soon (the lights not the best)

But I'm still deciding on what they will be, and whether I'll add anything else to them.


I've been a "bit" rubbish at updating this what with university coursework and christmas!

New Years Resolution No. 1: Update my blog and Etsy shop more often!