Skill Investigation: Embroidery
Made by Erin Fuller
Created: October 6th, 2018
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Intention
I wanted to explore embroidery. I got interested in it this summer but only made one small thing. It was important also for me in this project to combine traditional embroidery with tech.
The design I came up with is the big dipper constellation, a fitting thing to add lights to, along with a lyric to a song for my sorority. The diagram below shows my design along with the electrical diagram for the lights.
Process
I did not do any serious embroidery such as satin stitching, just running stitch and back stitch in this project, so the learning curve of the embroidery was pretty low. I chose to embroider the words first, then the lights, and finally finishing embroidery details such as the star connection. The lights were very much a trial and error process: I flipped the positive and negative sides, the conductive thread does not knot as well, and the pattern to make a parallel circuit was difficult.
My embroidery was not perfect and varied over the phrase as I tested out different techniques. For example, I think my "h" in "the" did not turn out very good, but "mine" of "shine" did. I guess this just proves that practice does make perfect. While using the conductive thread I was conscious of how many times it overlapped because I was scared of short-circuiting the circuit but it ended up working out fine.
Reflection
Reflect on the process of making this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently?
Again this was a lot of trial and error, mostly on the tech side, but overall very satisfying to finish this project. If I did this again, the only thing I would do differently is slow down and pay more attention to detail. This isn't like a drawing where you can erase and redraw one part, if you don't like a part of an embroidery project you either have to suck it up or redo a large part of your project.
