Fiber Optic Wedding Dress

This wedding dress was enhanced by fiber optic lighting elements and 3D printing for decorative and utilitarian purposes. This instructable will provide you with the different steps to making this dress yourself.

I knew the actual dress would look a bit different, but for $86 it was not too bad at all!

When we were dating, he wrote a really nice poem for me. He's a tad shy about the contents of the poem, so it's in Script on a spiral printed with Flexi TPU.

1. Words on spiral in Inkscape

2. Import to Fusion 360 to extrude for 1mm. Fusion 360 was more stable for the imports because there were too many polygons for Tinkercad to handle.

3. Print with Flexi TPU

4. Hand sew to tule

Sketch and plan out where the flowers go. I used clear thread to sew it on making sure that I only sew into the top layer of the dress.

I bought the Playbulb string lights because they come with an app to control the exact lighting. Unfortunately they only come in green, so I had to cover it in white electrical tape.

For this dress, it worked to attach it under the first layer of ruffles. Picture is shown with the first fiber optic whip attached.

Find where it is convenient to attach a pocket. You'll need a pocket to hold the battery so you can walk around with the dress lit up.

The fiber optic whips need to attach the bulbs with minimum loss of light as well as maximizing the number of cables in a whip bundle. Tinkercad was perfect for this. Adaptor was a solid print, but the picture shows it clear so you can see how it was CADed. It was printed on white ninjaflex on the Ender 2 with Cura as the slicer.

1. Either low temp hot glue or sugru the whips into the adaptors and adaptors into the bulbs.

2. Make sure you sand the ends of the end glow fiber optic to have some light diffusion. If you don't do it all before the whips attach to the dress, your bridesmaids may be generous and help the day before the wedding.

3. I ordered 6000 meters and used about 2000 meters in the making of this dress.

Our photographer was great! He is a lighting genius! Make sure you take photos of the dress in different lighting. For more photos go to to www.annamattwatson.com