Waterbomb | A kinetic dress

Mechanical System

Once we had the waterbomb fabric, we looked at different mechanical systems that we could use to actuate it. We finally decided on monofilament truss system that we threaded through eyelets that we laser cut and hand sewed onto the vertices of the waterbomb valleys. We used these to control the movement we wanted from the dress via 3 cords made up smaller connections from the wiring in the dress. One string controlled the front vertical movement of the dress, the other the back vertical movement and the last one controlled constricting horizontal movement.

Electrical System

Mahvish and I are both software kind of girls with experience in small scale robotics, so we were super excited to jump in and …learn some basic electrical engineering. We designed the system to be relatively straightforward with that in mind. We anchored most of the heavier elements to the incredibly sturdy zipper of the dress so we wouldn’t need crazy boning/corsetry to hold it up.

(parts from top left clockwise: diy continuous rotation servo with bobbin, battery packs x2, diy voltage regulator, breadboard prototype for the breath sensor, slightly more buff diy continuous rotation servo hot glued to laser cut mount)

One of the most exciting elements of this project for us (and ultimately, the key to our doom), was the fact that we built the key elements of the electrical system ourselves. We hacked some basic hobby servos Mahvish had for continuous rotation by removing the pentometer and replacing it with two 2.2kohm resistors. We also built a voltage regulator so we could power our initial design, which required 5 normal servos, off of a single 9volt that we ended up scrapping, but were immensely proud of. Lastly the breath sensor built into the collar took advantage of the thermochromatic paint. When the wearer breathes on it, the paint changes color which is picked up by a light sensor and sent to the Lilypad.

(hacked servo on left, removed pentometer on right)

Fabric Waterbomb

Reaction Diffusion Textile Printing

If you haven't already, check out this post where I talk about how I created the pattern that I'm printing here first.

So I made the decision to try to print the fabric here on campus rather than shipping the file off to Spoonflower or one of the other companies that will do this work for you. This was partly for budgetary reasons, but also because I wanted to be involved in every step of the process, and this is a big part of it.

Unfortunately our print lab was out of nice rolls of HP print fabric, so I ended up ironing on some fusible to the back of some basic cotton I had and running it through the printer. First up some test swatches.

Since this fabric was just cheap stuff from Joannes and not treated with anything to make it better suited to absorbing the ink, the colors didn't come out quite as I intended. So I tried two versions, one normal and one with the red keyed out (since the printer handled black and blue much better)

Ultimately, I was very attached to the red design and just keyed up the contrast on photoshop ( I also can layer the same red sheer I used in the final gown of my collection to intensify the color during garment construction).

And after a stressful hour and a half of wrangling with the printer, what I ended up with was a beautiful yard and a half of custom reaction diffusion fabric! I can't wait to turn this into a finished piece, even though I ended up eating a lot of my fabric doing test swatches, so I don't have quite enough to make a complete dress, a bodice will most likely suffice.

I also ended up using the black and white version to line the white dress in my collection, a detail you can't see from the runway photos :)

Reaction Diffusion Textiles and Pattern Making

Okay this this particular look from the collection, modeled by the super badass Madison, I dropped the ball on just a bit.

As lovely and clean as it looks in the white, I really wanted to use it as a base for my reaction diffusion algorithm, with the end result looking more like this. (Though I do love the clean well tailored lines)

To that end, I've been working on remaking it using a little more digital prowess, including the textile printing that was slightly out of my budget for the original.This was actually the first dress I designed for the collection, thus there were many many tortured muslin iterations as I learned how to make a well fitting garment.

After finally getting one that fit nicely to my dress form, I tore it apart and scanned it in. Madison's version was actually heavily tailored from this pattern (since we only were able to fit our models after winter break), and her hips and arms are much more slender than my own or the dress form's.

 From here, I was a quick live trace away from a nice clean vector image of my pattern to scale, which I then threw into a slightly tailored reaction diffusion application in Cinder. For those of you who have never encountered reaction diffusion, it looks something like this.

It essentially is two equations that can be used to simulate a chemical reaction that is used in nature to generate an infinite number of animal patterns/prints. This is old code from earlier my knit reaction diffusion work. Toxiclibs does an amazing job of summarizing the more technical aspects of the simulation if you are interested.

I was particularly interested in incorporating this simulation/generative art into my fashion design work since I think it draws a very elegant parallel to the furs/skins more often used in high fashion and on the run way. This application allows you to grow your own personally customized "skin" directly onto the pattern pieces for an organic and personalized feel that you don't need to carefully skin hundreds of tropical fish for.

Here's the final pattern, with each pattern piece thrown into the application and its texture grown onto it.

Check out This Post where I talk about the printing process

Kitsune | Runway for Lunar Gala

So many hours of work distilled into that one moment

And here's footage of the entire runway show. Check out the other lines on cmuTV's youtube channel!

Delaunay Dress

Computational Knitwear, IN THE FLESH(fiber?)

So this is a dress I've designed for the show next week using the generative cabling/knitting strategies from a ways back. Since this wasn't so much a technical project, but an aesthetic one I took some liberties with the algoirthm, blowing portions of it way up (like the bodice here) or just using strips for the waist band and the edging.

Construction + Pattern Making | Lunar Gala