The first step in creating our wearable noise accessory is to create a textile sensor.
There are several ways to approach this. Here I started with an ordinary black fabric, added a layer of foam, another layer of black fabric, a conductive fabric, then a resistive fabric on side one. On side two I repeated the pattern of a resistive, a conductive and an ordinary fabric.
Don’t forget to test how conductive your sensor is before sewing it together..!
Now we want to connect our conductive sensor to a textilo to control a little speaker. You can find a step by step tutorial on the textilo itself here. The trickiest part for me was soldering the components to the texilo itself as it can be quite tricky to soder carefully without burning the fabric.
The next step is to brainstorm and decide what sort of material or wearable you want to create. I worked with very talented Jaqueline Banting, a fashion student at Parsons Paris. We conceptualized a wearable accessory made out of fabric that fits like a necklace. This meant, we needed to start from scratch. We chose a few fabrics and started to work out the composition of the textilio, sensor, battery and speaker.
This quickly turned into this. A piece with two pockets, the one on the left for the sensor, the one on the right for the battery.
It was time to test the functionality. Unfortunately due to some soldering mistakes it was not functioning properly.
But, we didn’t let that hold us back from finishing the prototype. The wearable was created, the textilo was pinned and after a few hours in the fashion lab we came up with this…
I plan to re-create the textilo and I hope to be abel to get it to a working state soon!