Studio Project 2: Enhanced Clothing With Glowing EL Wire

In this week, we have been introduced to the sewing machine and the EL wires. Our assignment is to make an illuminated garment, outfit, or costume using surface application of EL wire or insertion into seams. Since I wanted to make something I really could wear, I thought of an old garment which I found in my home during last spring-cleaning that could fit to my body quite well. It was a pink, long vest with a little bit Chinese elements on it. I realized that maybe adding some EL wires on it will make it more special so I decided to use this garment as my subject. From the pictures above, you could see that I added several EL wires to show the garments' outline and sewed the pattern of a couple of birds, which is a common pattern in the traditional Chinese paintings, on the back of the garment. In doing so, I hope the garment could be reformed while still have some traditional Chinese elements on it so as to showcase a mixture of the past and the future. If you are interested in how I made it, please read the following steps:

Last month, my mom I had a spring-cleaning in our house. We found many weird and interesting clothes deep inside a shelf that we didn't normally open. To further explain, you could see it in one of the above pictures. It was blocked by our night table so was not convenient to open. This pink vest was one of the garments we found. It was somehow in Chinese style but not very delicately. Moreover, the brand tag inside it was in English. My mom guessed that it would be something that my grandmother bought from the cheap clothing markets during their first visit to the United States. I tried it on and realized that it fits to my body size quite well and the color also matches with my skin tone. However, I still thought the design of it was too plain and a little bit outdated so I didn't want to wear it out.

This week, when I saw the assignment requirements, I immediately thought of this garment. I felt that it has a potential to look special and fashionable. Moreover, since it could fit to my body size, I could wear it out and showcase my design. Therefore, I picked this piece of garment to work with.

Since this garment is already a Chinese style vest, instead of totally eliminate its Chinese style elements, I actually wanted to add more Chinese elements to it. Therefore, I researched different Chinese elements online. In my mind, one of the main elements in Chinese drawings would be flowers such as peony, narcissus, and calla lily. I tried to research on their outline drawings and realized that it was difficult to make them using EL wires as they were formed with many segments of short lines.

Then, I tried to research what I could draw with only one line. There were many interesting results such as roses, human faces, elephants, and pigs.etc. The one that grabbed my attention was birds. Birds was also a commonly used pattern in Chinese drawings, especially couple birds. In the above pictures, you could find different species of couple birds in Chinese paintings. I found this interesting video about how you could use only one line to draw a bird on Weibo: https://m.weibo.cn/5599936826/4525594794679721.Then, I found various forms of bird drawing by using one only one line and I put some of them in the above pictures too.

On Wednesday afternoon, I went to the the Fabrication Lab and prepared to start my garment reformation. My design could be separated into 3 parts: the outlines, the birds on the back, and the buttons. Firstly, I took down the little pieces on the right and the left side of the garment which connected the front and the back. Therefore, I could sew the outline of the garment smoothly using the sewing machine. I would also make inside pockets in the garment. The plugs of the EL wires would be leave through the bottom end of the cloths so they could be later plugged into the splitters and hide with the power supplies inside the pockets.

For the birds in the back, I decided to hand stitch them. I first sketched out the birds on a piece of paper. I designed two one-line birds which were in different poses while having an eye contact with each other. As I mentioned above, couple birds were common elements in Chinese paintings and I hope my design could both keeping the authentic eastern feeling of the cloth and adding something new to it. After finished the sketching on paper, I used chalk to drew the design on the garment.

The last part of my design was adding LED circuits that we learnt in the last assignment. To further explain, I thought the old buttons of this cloths were quite ugly and I wanted to have something new and fit to my other ideas.

I started with making the outlines. This was because that the pattern may have some wires that would encounter the edges of the garment and if I sewed the pattern first, it would be more difficult for me to sewed the outlines using the sewing machine.

Before starting, I thought making the outlines would be quite easy. To be specific, I just needed to control the sewing machine and stitched out straight lines. Indeed, stitching the outline was really not as easy as I thought and it was maybe the hardest step in the whole process. Before stitching on my garment, I first tried to stitch EL wires on a random piece of cloth under the professor's guide. Through this experience, I learnt two things. Firstly, we had to change the presser foot to a special kind which have a place that could fit to the EL wire's shape and prevent hurting it. It was showed in the second image above. Another thing I learnt was that we could not put the EL wires directly on the sewing machine as its feed dog may hurt the EL wires. Therefore, we found some pattern-making papers to put under the EL wires for protection. Later, we could tear off the papers after the sewing was finished. Things went quite well on the experiment cloth and I decided to move on to sew on my garment.

This was the place where everything went to an unexpected place for me. I realized that my garment had thick edges and adding El wires to the edges made them thicker. I could hardly put everything, which included my garment, the EL wire, and a piece of pattern-making garment, all under the presser foot. When I finally started sewing, I realized that the EL wire was always trying to escape from the garment and I could not sew them together. There was the time that I succeeded sewing them together for a little while, but then everything became apart again. I knew that I could not do things this way and tried to change my settings. After several experiments, I found out that since the edge of my garment was very thick, the special presser foot didn't functioned as it should be and changing back to the normal presser foot would not hurt the EL wires in my case. Another thing I realized was that instead of using the pattern-making paper to sew along with my garment, I could just use the paper tape to stick it on the sewing machine's feed dog and this could also prevent hurting the EL wires. After doing these changes, the sewing process became better a little bit. 3 hours have passed, I finally finished sewing the first EL wire.

In this experience,The largest problem I met was that the EL wire kept trying to escape from the thick edges of my garment. I thought that maybe I could first hand stitch the EL wires onto the garment roughly so the EL wires could not move and then use the sewing machine to strengthen their connections. I consulted the professor and she agreed that this would be a good idea and the technique was called basting. On Thursday, I used the basting technique to sew the EL wires on to the two side edges. On Friday morning, I used the sewing machine to sew the other outlines. This time, everything was quick and successful. It took me only about 2 hours to sew the other 2 outlines using the sewing machine.

After finish making the outlines of the garment, I started to sew the two birds. Firstly, I used paper tape to visualized the birds and make sure which are the ways that the EL wires were going. Another thing I needed to make sure was whether one EL wire was long enough for each birds. I realized that the blue wire's length could perfectly fit the upper bird while the pink bird needed more than one EL wires. After making sure the wires' positions, I started to stitch out the birds. It was not as difficult as the usage of the sewing machine. Although I had to be careful and patient, everything was under control. On Saturday afternoon, I finished sewing these two birds.

Finally, I was doing some finishing steps such as cutting the unused part of the EL wires and wrapping their ends carefully with insulator tapes. Then, I started to think of the parts in my design that I haven't added to the garment. One of them was the LED buttons. I realized that the LED lights I borrowed from the Equipment Room were in different colors. Therefore, I decided not to use them as I didn't want to make the color combination of my design too complex. Another one thing that I haven't added was to bottom El wire line for the backside of the clothes. I discussed with professor Minsky and Yuchen, and I decided to not put on this part. To further explain, not adding the line would give the audience more spaces to imagine the birds' story.

The last step was sewing the pockets to hide the power supplies. Luckily, there were these parts which was inside the garment and could be easily sewed into a pocket. What I needed to do was just carefully picking up the stitches and not letting them show up in the front side of the garment. In the evening of Saturday, I finally finished my piece! Yeah!

Although encountered many challenges, I was really happy to finish this enhanced garment and I loved the beautiful effect it created in the darkness. I shared the final results with friends and family members; they all liked it and thought it was cool!

If you would like to know more about the final effect, Here is also a video of my work: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16YgjaHVHpYJ2-zp0JvxgcauAmrBfSeKn/view?usp=sharing