Thank you nice customers who have been pre-ordering Laser Lace Tees and Tops! As a special surprise, artist Katherine Moon designed a trio of buttons for me to give away with all of my pre-orders. We just sent the art off to the button making factory, but here’s a photoshop rendering of what they will look like.

Katherine is one of my favorite artists. She loves to collect photos of mushrooms, and they show up in a lot of her work, like this piece titled, “Stink Horn.”

Katherine says that she ironically loves hand drawn images, since there aren’t many in today’s digital age. She makes most of her art using the computer (including the above piece titled, “Cat’s-Meow”). Cat’s Meow was created from a scanned black and white painting, but Katherine says that she likes to draw her latest work directly on the computer using Painter 12 and Photoshop. I wonder if a tablet will soon replace her Moleskine and gel pens.

I love Katherine’s work and hope that you will enjoy her buttons.

I am excited to be launching my new mini collection of Laser Lace Tees and Tops. The idea for this collection started with the book Bossypants, where Tina Fey writes: Don’t wear what fashion designers tell you to wear. Wear what they wear. and then shares her love of comfortable clothes. I could relate. I love wearing t-shirts and jeans and don’t usually wear light up clothes with 140 volt circuits. But t-shirts and jeans aren’t really design studio appropriate. So I decided to distress a bunch of T-shirts in lace patterns. The laser was a perfect solution to creating precision lace patterns coupled with techniques found through A LOT of experimentation to properly distress and stabilize the lace.

Photos of the Glass Flower Collection from Harvard Museum of Natural History

However, when t-shirts are worn, the patterns are stretched out, so I looked at floral anatomy and botanical cells for inspiration. The cells create a structure that is similar to the stretching patterns of the shirt. Since the anatomy is from flowers, it still adds a femininity to the designs.

Cross-section of a dicot root with fragments of lateral roots originating at the pericycle.
courtesy of Flickr’s BlueRidgeKitties and Carolina Biologicals

Cross-section of a dicot root with a lateral root breaking through the epidermis.
courtesy of Flickr’s BlueRidgeKitties and Carolina Biologicals

I received a limited edition Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from the Google developers conference for my birthday. I love the android design on the back! But I am super excited because I can take photos, sketch directly over the photo, and upload the image directly to my blog. No more scanning + I can draw/color in layers + undo function + my little sketchbook of the future fits in my tiny Rebecca Minkoff purse. This is my first 100% tablet made blog post.

I’m excited to be working on a new project with Moleskine, prototyping a Moleskine notebook of the future for their event, Objectivity: Notebook Hacking, Collaborative Drawing, and New Collections. I started the project with a visit to the Moleskine NYC showroom. Since I am already a Moleskine user, this was like being let loose in a candy shop. Moleskine let me select a stack of notebooks to bring back to my studio for testing. Many Moleskine notebooks were sacrificed to perfect this hack.

To me, a future Moleskine would illuminate like the outfits in Tron. To achieve this I selected an electroluminescent sign prototyping material, a cutable EL sheet. I’m going to try and use this with the programmable EL Sequencer from Sparkfun that I used in my Make: Programming EL Fashion blog post. This way I will be able to cut custom shapes that light up, then program the shapes to turn on and off in an animated pattern. I am not sure if the cutable sheet will work with the sequencer, but I will test it this afternoon to find out.

Objectivity, hosted at Eyebeam, is free and open to the public on May 15th from 6-9pm with RSVP. In the afternoon, I will be teaching a free workshop on customizing Moleskine notebooks with EL sheets described above. In the evening I will be on hand to show folks how to hack free Moleskine minis with LEDs.

Here are some photos from the Fabric Deployable Structures workshop that I taught for the Colab Summer Workshop Series.

We spent the morning doing paper shapes exploration based on Miura Ori research from Julian Vincent and University of Bath. I feel that with this sort of exploration it is most satisfying to discover your own shapes. So I started by showing students how to create a few examples, then showed them how to deviate from the standard patterns to create their own models. I thought this would make it possible for students to create their own shapes outside of class.

Then in the afternoon we translated the paper models to fabric and sewed them up into garments. My favorite part of the workshop was working with the fashion students from AUT University. They were really full of energy, and I could practically see their brains churning while they were thinking about the possibilities of what could be made. So hopefully this class will help with their degree projects.

This week in New Zealand I have been teaching workshops for the Colab Summer Workshop Series. I taught an inflatables workshop, an EL wire workshop, a fabric deployable structures workshop, and a sewing soft circuits workshop. Below are some images from the EL wire and sewing soft circuits workshop. I’ll post some photos from the other workshops later this week.

For the Sewing Soft Circuits workshop, I made a pattern that I thought would be versatile enough for the students to put in different garments. One of the students brought in a beautiful handmade felt to stitch her circuit on. I thought the weight of the felt was very nice.

Below are some garments made in the EL wire workshop.

Greetings from New Zealand where my first solo exhibit, TechStyle opened earlier this week at the ST PAUL St. Gallery. I am here for an artist residency through Colab (similar only in name to Collab the shared studio space I work from in NYC). Stop by to see the exhibit, or make a reservation to come Tuesday for our private event.

‘TechStyle’ by Diana Eng
25 January – 5 February 2011
(Times: Tuesday – Friday 10.00 am – 5.00 pm, Saturday 12.00 – 4.00 pm)
ST PAUL St Gallery,
40 St Paul St, Auckland Central

Here are some photos from the setup. Alan, Guy, and Charlotte did a really great job getting everything together.

The exhibit has a range of my work including garments from my book, Fashion Geek: Clothes, Accessories, Tech.

Getting electronic garments to CES’s FashionWare fashion show across the United States is a challenge. The garments are made out of hand sewn silk chiffon and shipping them in a box where they would be tousled and folded for days would ruin them. On the other hand bringing homebrew electronics that are duct taped into clothing on a plane is rather suspicious looking. I spent 12 hours disassembling the clothing, removing the circuit boards, weird pieces of electrical tape, wires and batteries. My goal, to carry-on 4 electronic garments. I packed the circuit boards in static free bags packed in electronics boxes from digikey. I only brought new in the package batteries. I packed all of my wires neatly in plastic ziplocks. I wrapped the clothes in tissue paper (prevents wrinkling) and carried them in garment bags. And I made it no questions asked. I shipped my soldering iron, pliers, wire cutters, and sewing scissors to the hotel.

Our rehearsal at Fashion Mall went really well last night. I’m heading into CES now.