It took me three years to perfect the Fibonacci Scarf pattern, and it takes hundreds of hours to hand knit one scarf. So I brought my Fibonacci Scarf pattern to the Textile Design Lab (TDL) in New Zealand to see if they would be able to manufacture them. They were able to program my design into the computer, hit “print”, and have their whole garment knitting machine spit out Fibonacci knit scarves, just like printing on a home inkjet printer. In this photo you see a sweater coming out, but that’s a project I will tell you about later.

At TDL very talented technician Gordon programs whole garment knitting machines and works with a lot of super soft merino wools. Whole garment knitting machines are able to knit an entire garment. You don’t need to sew up seams or attach sleeves, a finished garment comes out of the machine.

When you create the program for a knit garment, you can copy and paste sections of the code from other garments. So you can add a sleeve from something, and a collar from something else. There wasn’t anything like the Fibonacci Scarf, so Gordon had to create the program from scratch. It’s a complicated knit structure, and he was able to program in details like different amounts of tension for a lot of individual stitches. Above is a screen shot of the knit program getting debugged. You can actually go through, look at the individual stitches, and make corrections to the code.

Above is a video of the machine knitting. You can see the carriage moving back and forth as it knits the yarn across a bed of needles.

TDL specializes in making low quantity experimental designs. They work a lot with very soft merino wools and merino possum blends. After all merino wool is one of New Zealand’s top luxury exports. The Fibonacci Scarves are all knit from the local NZ stuff that TDL helped me to source. The scarves are knit on the very machine pictured above and then brought to the US. You can buy one in our shop.

I wanted to make the initial run of Fortune Cookie Coin Purses myself. So I made my own leather cutting machine by hacking together pieces from different professional cutting machines. The machine I made was difficult to operate, so I went to visit a professional cutter where I learned that the most efficient way to cut the coin purses was actually by hand with scissors. The cutter was really nice and will be cutting my next product.

While vinyl is eco friendly, I wanted to make my Fortune Cookie Coin Purses with real, high-grade leather . I decided to recycle remnant leather. But finding the leather was a big adventure and took months of finding pieces here and there. I feel like the cookies have different personalities, because each piece of leather has it’s own story.

I want purse owners to be able to follow the history of their cookie. Each purse is branded with a custom number using the trusty laser cutter. You can look up your purse’s number on our website to see where your leather originated from.

Fortune Cookie Coin Purse was been in development for four months, here’s a look back at the first sketch, prototype, and dust bag mock up. I’ve been wanting to create a Fortune Cookie Coin Purse for years. I really studied the shape of the real cookie to get the angle of the cookie’s pinch just right. The dust bag design was inspired by gourmet food wrappers and Chinese paper cuts.

Fortune Cookie Coin Purse holds a small fortune. Like real fortune cookies, these purses are proudly made in the USA. Made from recycled leather, each purse has a unique number on it so you can track its origin.

Purchase here for $65

The shoot was incredibly long, but all of our hard work paid off and I am happy with how the video turned out. I’ve still never had a shoot that was a tiring my Project Runway days.

Photos some rights reserved by WBPLabs, taken by: Lindsey Sundboom

Last fall, I had a lot of fun being a mentor for an episode of PBS SciGirls which aired last week. I worked with 11 year old SciGirls Ariella, Hallie, and Sophia to create a super hero princess dress for the Fairytale Fashion launch party. Watch the Episode here.

The girls designed the super hero prince dress and I showed them how to make it. The dress had an EL wire cape controlled by an accelerometer so that the cape lit up in reaction to motion. And the skirt inflated to create a billowing cloud effect which every flying superhero princess needs.

The girls programmed an Arduino microcontroller to make conductive thread embroidered LEDs sparkle on lace. The girls really liked sparkly things. When I was showing them how to program the Arduino to make the LEDs sparkle, they practically pushed me out of the way so that they could program the sparkles themselves. I didn’t even finish explaining how to write the program. The girls just took over.

In between takes, Ariella, Hallie, and Sophia made up a song and dance for everything, the ironing dance, the LED song. It would be interesting to see little girls take over the electronics world with sparkle programs and soldering songs.

The Twin Cities Public Television production crew was one of the nicest I’d ever worked with. The whole crew was really chipper and upbeat which made them great for working with the girls. And I enjoyed drinking the juice boxes that were always on set. Thank you model Jen Kresge, make-up artist Santiago Sibert, and big thanks to Collab for letting us use their space.

The full FairytaleFashion.org site should be up on Monday. Weekly episodes will be going up every Monday. I’m starting next week with deployable structures.