Description
Little foxy with a flower.
It all started with a few stitches, which were just for learning such stitches and their variations and attaching a couple of LEDs to the fabric, connecting them with a conductive tread and a 3.5V battery. Also learning that you should be insulating your conductive tread (which somehow never crossed my mind) and satin stitch is a cool way yo do that. The stitches are absolutely random, but when I looked at my embroidery hoop in the end, I have definitely made a fox, with cute little, green-glowy eyes. I thought how long will it take, I’m a fast creator, one-two hours to do the stitching… how wrong was I 🙂 Turns out there were things I had to figure out along the way, which was super fun, but took a bit more time.
Thinking of my grandma and all the embroidery she had done throughout the years. She was an artist and a teacher, did oil painting of portraits and landscapes. As she was getting older, she’d never stop creating, but rather did it in other various ways. Fox example, she did tapestry and those would take such a long time. They were perfect. Maybe I didn’t think I would be doing something similar – I only had a few shapes to make and I used the fun, cute fabric that I really like – blue and orange with cute little white dots –Â so it wouldn’t be the same. In the end I really appreciated what she was doing and now look at in a slightly different way. I appreciate the craft, the creativity, the drive to go along with something piece by piece, the tiniest stitch by tiniest stitch and even how one feels about the passage of time, before, after, and during. I have no idea how it is for her, but all this for me can be quite meditative – only as using the word to try to describe, being at peace & “somewhere else”, relax, accomplish, something out of the “real” world that you would come back to.
There were a few things I was trying to achieve as I was working out what the fox would be, what the fox will do, and why. Some of the practical once were being able to hide the battery and to be able to change the battery easily. Then being able to secure the battery easily and without a hassle to the Foxy. I thought the battery can be it’s nose, and I wanted the fox to have a small one. So – having a small battery. I had some hearing aids batteries, they were good size – they are 1.4V, so I had to use two.
So if the nose is a battery, where and what would the other battery be? It had to be story and it had to make sense within it.
I wanted to be able to turn the eyes on and off in a fun way and just by using the circuit and not with an ugly, plastic on/off switch for example.
I thought I can use the batteries themselves somehow to close and open the circuit. For hiding the battery, I thought I could crochet the nose, still with the embroidery tread, so it doesn’t look like it’s not part of the whole piece. I looked at videos of how to crochet something like that – I had to do a tiny magic circle – only six loops and then make a small tube. I’ve crocheted one winter hat with a magic circle maybe 3 years ago, and it took me awhile to slightly remember and to see what exactly people were doing. Watching videos on 0.25 speed is pretty funny.
As foxes obviously like flowers, it made sense that the other battery would be hidden in a flower. After the nose, I tried to make a flower, again with a few videos, but all of my attempts were little disasters. I decided to deal with that later and keep going with the rest.
I wanted to try different stitches to see how they looked. I tried the chain stitch a couple of times, ones around the fox, and second time around the flower thinking maybe I’ll change my mind as I see it and like it, but I didn’t, so I got rid of it. But I liked how you could create volume by using different lengths satin stitch and thought a great place for that would be the tail. It took more than two tries, maybe four? Turns out it wasn’t that easy as the pretty pictures make you believe. But in the end I was happy.
Last but not least – probably the only real obstacle, because I couldn’t figure it out until the very end, was why my circuit sometimes will work and sometimes it won’t. I thought maybe I damaged the conductive tread as I was doing the satin stitches, but it was strange because the eyes will glow with the 3.5V battery, but not with the hearing aids batteries. Using the same connections, etc, etc. I’ve only used them for testing this, they were brand new, and it didn’t really make sense that they would die so quickly, but at one point I put two brand new ones, they worked a couple of times, but as I was getting ready to proceed, I’ll test again and they had stopped.
What I was figuring out at the time was how to attach the batteries with the nose and flower to the fox – and I’ve done this before – I wanted to use magnets. The 3.5V battery had no problem with them whatsoever, as far as it goes with my testing – it still worked, but as soon as the hearing aid batteries got close to them, they were gone. I finally looked online and some people say batteries in general are fine with magnets, one article said “keep your hearing aid batteries away from any magnets”, so that’s what I did.
Although that wasn’t the original plan, I was fine in the end with using the bigger battery. The flower that I had made – spoiler – I did come back to crocheting the flower maybe two weeks later, and did it on the first try without any instructions – somehow my brain had figured it out in the background – was big enough to hide the 3.5V battery, so that was perfect. I put small magnets in the crochet parts where the smaller batteries were supposed to be and it was all done! Well, not exactly, I had to put the Foxy with a flower in a frame and tame the back of the piece. Oh and my signature. Done. 🙂
(Mostly) the whole process have been turned into a video. Hours and hours of video. I will post it soon, and I’ll update the link. Check it out 🙂
The reason I was even doing the initial stitches and learning how to do them was because Linh My Truong was showing us embroidery, circuits and conductive tread – it was the very first class of “Treads and Circuits” – where she would show us so many cool things having to do with electronics, microcontrollers, wearables, e-textiles, fabric dying, knitting and so much more. It’s a really cool learning experience hosted by Dogbotic.
***
