We dearly thank all the participants for making the workshop a success. Special thanks to Andrew Gryf Paterson and Pixelversity, as well as to Kässämartat for providing their stitching expertise, and TAUKO clothing designers for providing the recycled fabrics.

We also welcome everyone to see the wonderful outcomes of the workshop in May in Helsinki. The creative works will be exhibited at the Open Design, Crafts & Manufacturing demo-stalls at Arbis adult education centre during Camp Pixelache on 12.5.2012.

Below are couple photos from the workshop – more can be found on our Flickr pages. See also documentation by Till Bovermann.

Photos by Kati Hyyppä / CC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0

How to make a LED circuit – PDF version

How to make a battery holder from felt – PDF version

Firstly, couple of people from Kässämartat provide their expertise with embroidery stitches. Kässämartat are handicraft enthusiasts, who organize various crafting activities in the Helsinki area. Kässämartat operates under the larger community Uudenmaan Martat, which in turn is part of the nationwide Martat organization. With its wide network of local volunteer groups, Martat has a history of over 100 years in providing guidance in many kinds of household activities such as cooking, gardening and crafts, including environmental and economical issues.

Another helping hand comes from TAUKO, which is a Helsinki based clothing brand. TAUKO designs are made from recycled materials, locally and by hand. TAUKO is supporting the e-embroidery workshop by providing recycled textiles for us to work on.

Lastly, to show some more stitches and textures for inspiration, we introduce Wizard, another e-embroidery character and a friend of Anglerfish. Looking forward to e-embroidering!

I started by fitting the LED in the appropriate part of the anglerfish by sliding the two legs of the LED from the top of the embroidery so that the legs stick out at the bottom where they can be connected to the circuit.

Already curious to see what the LED would look like when bright, I held a battery between the legs of the LED beneath and this was the result on top:)

Continuing with the circuit design, next the LED needed to be fixed properly so that the conductive yarn can be sewn around the legs.

To do this, I twisted each leg of the LED into a loop with a pair of pliers so that the loops lay flat beneath the surface of the fabric. This is a common technique used to sew on any electronic component that has legs. In a LED, the longer leg is positive and the shorter one is negative. Its good to mark these beforehand, as after twisting the legs it might be difficult to identify them without testing.

When both legs of the LED are twisted, it looked something like the image below. The loops make it easy to sew on the conductive yarn around them.

Also when the legs are twisted, the LED is attached firmly in its appropriate place and can be left there while the rest of the embroidery work gets done.

The circuit that lights the LED was a simple one with a switch that can be used to turn off and on the light. To make it compact, the button cell holder had to placed over the embroidered part under the fabric. The image below shows the placement of the button cell holder and the circuit plan drawn beneath.

Since the cell holder goes over the embroidered part, the embroidery needed to be finished first before continuing making the circuit.

Filling in embroidery

There are some good tutorials for filling-in embroidery stitches in Needle and thread. However, I went with a more intuitive/ visual approach of just filling in the spaces with coloured threads without following a particular stitching technique. I had a few shades of red, black and white embroidery threads that I improvised with to fill up the different regions of the anglerfish trying to create an appropriate mix of shades and tones.

I found mixing strands of dark thread with light ones a good way to create shades and tints. Also mixing them made the stitches appear as strokes whose direction and density could then be manipulated to create a desired effect. I found there to be a lot of room for experimentation. Mistakes or undesired stitches could be corrected quite easily.

When finished, it looked something like this. I was quite happy with the result. The anglerfish looked pretty ferocious

For this electronic embroidery I wanted to work with Light emitting diodes(LEDs) that would light up as part of the embroidered pattern. I started by sketching some initial ideas, the aim was to make something simple enough for my first embroidery and to use a LED in a way that would be natural to the object or scene depicted..

I really liked the idea of making an embroidered deep sea anglerfish with a LED for its bio-luminescent ”lantern”. Below are some quick sketches for practice:)

To draw the anglerfish pattern on the fabric I used a coloured pencil, but went over it with a microtip black pen afterwards to make the outline clearly visible.

Embroidery stitching:

There are some great videos of different embroidery stitches at Needle’n Thread.

I chose to do a simple back stitch as the outline for the anglerfish in two colours (out of the few I had)- red and black.

(is it just me or does this image make you feel funny in the teeth..?:)

And this is what it looked like when the outline was finished!

More links to embroidery images here.