HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

KOBA Winter School of Wickedfabrics

January 21-25 2019, KOBA in Berlin, Germany

We have been running our KOBA E-Textile Tailorshop for one year now. During this time we’ve been refining our skills in some of the most basic techniques like making hard-soft connections and detachable parts. But we have also been confronted with learning bespoke tailoring skills in taking a customer’s ideas from concept to robust artifact.

Before closing shop at the end of January next year, we want to offer a workshop to pass on these skills to a group of interested people.

This week-long KOBA Winter School of Wickedfabrics will walk you through the process of tailoring one e-textile garment, from concept to design, to interaction design to planning circuitry, sensors, actuators and programming the behavior of the garment. Every day will be a mix of hands-on tutorials with time to apply these skills on your own. Throughout the course of the week, each participant will construct their own e-textile garment, including time for debugging, to make sure it really works:-)

Links:
photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/sets/72157704021146302
swatchbook pages: http://kobakant.at/downloads/swatchbooks/19-KOBAwinterschool_swatchbook.pdf
announcement: https://www.kobakant.at/KOBA/koba-winter-school-of-wickedfabrics/

Participant Creations

Mandy “I’m Turning” Bike Jacket
>> https://www.mandyrosengren.com

This jacket combined what I learned at this program with my interests in sewing, engineering and biking. This jacket lights up to show the direction that a biker is turning based on American biking hand signals. This jacket was made from scratch and used a tilt switch to recognize the hand signals as well as two lulus and an Adafruit. I hope to continue prototyping my jacket and inspire students at my school to learn more about wearable technology.

Marcia
>> http://zaimph.org

I was interested in exploring the different types of e-textile fabrics and learning basic techniques to to use flexible and conductive materials to interact with sound. I ended up making a pressure sensitive shoe insert and a flexible bend sensor for my knee. Now that I’ve returned home I am teaching myself Max/MSP and working on a design for a touch controller that will interact with my synthesizer. here’s some photos from the workshop.

Anya Pumping Rainbow
www.inlovewithfire.de

I enjoyed the WS very much, it was so great to be in school again and learn about new materials. I learned that electronics are so tiny that i really need glasses – I do have some now-which is Great!
I also learned that I want to have a cutting Plotter- I got myself one, learned a lot about using it and made a lot of stencils for airbrush make up- Also Great!
I really liked to combine the sideglow fiber and the leds in the Lulus making a rainbow light and to control that with a bendsensor.
My idea was to have 2 bendsensors on each ellbow and controll the sideglow fiber from each Lulu and have a mix of colours in the middle of the fiberoptik strand. I cut and sew a white cotton jacket but the armhole didnt fit right so it pulled the sleeve in different directions when i lift and bend my arms and I was afraid that the bendsensor in the arm of the jacket would not be at the korrekt position where the bending is happening( ellbow).Still should have done it on the white jacket at that point!silly me!
But i decided to sew it on a seperate fabric first and then sew the GLOW project on a well fitted Jacket of mine. I wanted to sew on neoprene which is nice to sew on but then got pointed at the risk of pulling the conductive to much and breaking it cause the neoprene is elastic and the conductive thread is not.
So i changed my plan again and choose a fake leather that is not elastic but later I found out that it is very hard to stich by hand. I really wanted to make this glow project beeing able to glow in the time of the workshop and by that i put a lot of stress and pressure on me, made the mistake of not flipping the flora for the circuitry planning.When it came to testing it showed that all the connections to the flora and lulu sewn by hand with conductive thread where working but not being stable. With the wonderful help of Mica we connected it to my testbendsensor and programmed 2 different versions.
I found the outcome from the sideglow fibre much to weak to work as a glow garment, I should use much less than 2 meters! There was the hope that the lulus would maybe glow brighter if connected to another exit of the flora- I still would like to know if it is possible.
I didnt really get it to glow solid in the WS and was quite frustrated about it. At home I soldered all the connections and used thin wires on the Lulus.

Yvonne
>> www.robotheater.de
>> www.yvonnedicketmueller.de

During the workshop I tried out different techniques of making sensors and explored different types of conductive textile materials. I am interested in using E-textiles in future projects, be it in the field of puppetry or media art.
The photo shows a jacket I made with a sensor on the arm. The sensor is a potentiometer. Depending of where the metal pearl comes to rest on the potentiometer as the wearer of the jacket moves a different light-output is generated on the back of the jacket.