I’m excited about my new Ladybug Pin collection. I wanted the pins to look as realistic as possible so that it will look like the wearer has a real ladybug crawling on their shirt. The pins are modeled after 11 different species in the Coccinellidae or ladybug family (pictures of the real bugs are below). I was really surprised that there were so many different species of ladybugs. There was even a ladybug that looked like it had flames painted on the sides… unfortunately, I was not able to replicate that one. Nature is pretty amazing. Pins are $75 and available in my shop.

a. Cream-spotted Lady BeetleCalvia quatuordecimguttata, b. Fifteen-spotted Lady Beetle Anatis labiculata, c. Three-banded Lady Beetle Coccinella trifasciata, d. Seven-spotted Lady Beetle Coccinella septempunctata, e. California Lady Beetle Coccinella californica, f. Cream-spotted Lady Beetle Calvia quatuordecimguttata, g. Montezuma Lady Beetle Thalassa montezumae, h. Fifteen-spotted Lady Beetle Anatis labiculata, i. Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle Harmonia axyridis, j. Myzia interrupta, k. Two-spotted Lady Beetle Adalia bipunctata

Here’s a quick little video to demonstrate the Jack Frost Scarf in action. It’s not cold enough in NYC to demo it outside, so I used an ice tray. You can buy a scarf in our shop.

I’m getting ready for my next photo shoot and realized I forgot to post photos from the last one. So here’s a look back at our Laser Lace photo shoot:

When fashion photographer (and friend) Ricardo Louis and I were walking around Prospect Park scouting a location for our photo shoot, we decided to leave by way of the Grand Army Plaza arch. We walked up to the fountain and immediately thought, wow, can we shoot on the statue?

The answer is, yes, yes we can. We just had to overcome the issue of traversing the water surrounding the statue with model, hair stylist, make-up artist, photographer, assistant, and me.

My intern Kristin had the excellent idea of outfitting all of us in rain boots and we brought a step ladder to help us climb in and out of the water.

We had the pleasure of working with an excellent model from Click Models. She did a really nice job making dreamy model eyes. This is surprisingly hard to do, because the models squint a little which usually makes one eye bigger than the other. Some models do special exercises to maintain evenness. In addition, we are using reflectors to shine the sun directly into the models face (and eyes).

I wanted a 40′s hair style, so we worked with Selda Cortes from Lotus Salon who specializes in vintage pin-up hair styles. Make-up artist Jessica Jade Jacob often works with the NY Pin-up society, did the make-up.

I’m not one for glamor shots. But I discovered my narcissistic side when Jonathan Monaghan resident artist at MakerBot 3-D scanned me for their “New York Notables” event… and then was kind enough let me get 3-D scanned again. Scan with hair up, scan with hair down, scan with glasses, I even tried to curl up into a little ball so that my whole body would fit in the scanning area.

Here’s a phone video of me getting scanned courtesy of George Shammas. I think it’s like when they used to take old photographs, you had to sit still for a really long exposure and you only got a photo taken once or twice during your lifetime. Black colors don’t scan so I am covered in corn starch. The scans have lots of noise and don’t come out perfect (there’s extra little pieces everywhere and some empty spots as you can see in the image above. Jonathan cleaned up a 3-d model/scan of me with ponytail which you can download from Thingiverse.com and you can download my intern, Kristin. Below, I am printed on a MakerBot.

Thanks MakerBot and Jonathan for making a 3-d record of me the Summer of 2011. I plan to show the scan to my grand kids so they make fun of how dated I will look.

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.