During our many trips of 2011, we’ve found some golden remnants here and there. So we decided to make some limited edition Holiday Gold Fortune Cookie Coin Purses.

We ran out of our satin ribbon fortunes, so our friend, Tyler Denoff printed some more for us. Above is a look at how they are made.

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.

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’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

Back in November, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sarah Austin for Forbes Video on High-Tech Luxury Fashion. Here I am waiting to get mic’ed up before the shoot. I changed my dress to an electronic one shortly before we started. This is one of the first interviews where I have expressed a strong viewpoint, so I was afraid to see how I would be edited. But I am happy with the result, and it was great working with the Forbes team.

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.