Outcome

Overall Concept

The highlight of my last trip to Disney World was seeing the newest fireworks show at the Magic Kingdom, Happily Ever After.  I was blown away by the story, the score, and most of all intricacy and complexity of the fireworks themselves.  I wanted to create some sort of memento/souvenir that recreated some of the best moments from the show.  A tapestry was a great way to make it portable, while applying skills I learned in Soft Fabrication skills.  


The tapestry would have Cinderella's Castle up front.  Hidden in various elements of the castle would be several soft buttons that would actuate different fireworks.  Several LEDs would make be placed into firework like shapes above it, and would "burst" when the soft buttons were pressed.


For the purposes of this proposal, I focused on two of the iconic fireworks in the show.
The star going over Cinderellas Castle

And the multicolored "flower that blooms in adversity"

Materials
50-60 Flora-Neopixel LEDS-  These are sewable RGB LEDS that would be used to create the fireworks bursts.  The individual LEDS are important because I don't want the shapes of fireworks to be confined to a grid or circular layout, and would allow me to model complex behaviors more accurately.
Felt- To create the castle silhouette and top off the soft buttons
Conductive Fabric- To create the soft buttons
Conductive Thread- To sew it all together
Canvas fabric- For the background of the tapestry
Arduino LilyPad- as the microcontroller

Research- CharliePlexing 

This project involves a lot of LEDs.  However, most sewable microcontrollers only have 12 digital ports.  So i looked into a solution called Charlieplexing (http://www.instructables.com/id/Charlieplexing-the-Arduino/)

I drew out the circuit diagram for the star firework using 6 LEDs and and 3 digital ports. 

I also created a working prototype of the concept on my Arduino.