Suture: a Wearable Exploring the Relationship Between Between Human Beings and Plant

Suture is a wearable project exploring the relationship between humans and plants.

In today's world, where countless pressures weigh heavily on us, people's mental well-being has been deeply fragmented. In response, I began seeking strength from plants. With their remarkable self-healing abilities, they embody resilience— even when broken in half, they quietly mend their wounds and emerge renewed. Just as plants transform pain into growth, this project aims to explore the power of resilience and self-recovery, drawing inspiration from nature's ability to heal and thrive amidst adversity.

touch the wound part if you want to trigger the light!

1. arduino Nano
2. conductive thread
3. addressable LEDs
4. optic fiber
5. hot glue gun
6. yarn
7. lots of fabric!!!
8. lots of love❤️;-)

My inspiration cames from the relationship between our human and the plant.

Because my theme relates to the inner world and emotional resilience, I chose to place the wound at the location of the heart — every time the plants gently touch and comfort our wounds, it’s as if we’re embracing the brave version of ourselves that’s slowly healing.

The wounds and cracks symbolize the emotional scars within our inner world, while the green growing along the fractures represents the strength that resilient plants can bring us.

The fabric board showcases the color palette I’ve chosen for my work, as well as how I plan to use hot-melt adhesive techniques to create the texture of the wounds.

Because I've never made wearable before, I thought the prototype could be very important.

I first created a cute tiny one for my tiny little pig, and then make one of the real size.

I decided to make and use the capacitive touch sensor. Thus, I make a demo with my breadboard first.

Ideally, when my hand touches the wound, the light will be triggered. In other words, every time you learn to embrace yourself, you’re like a plant, giving yourself resilient life force.

After I saw that they were working well, I started stitching the circuits onto my fabric using conductive sewing thread.

I used optical fibers to shape the light, and polished and bent them so that the light could emit from the sides of the fibers instead of just from the ends.

I used yarn for the plants' texture to make them touchable.

I use hot glue gun for the wound edges. I used glitter to add color to the surface of the hot-melt glue.

I sewed all the components together and added buttons for easy wearing.

If you still wanna know more about about this piece! Here is my detailed documentation! link to detailed documentation

Since this was also my first time working with Arduino, I referred to some tutorials on YouTube.

Now it's credit time! A big thank you to those generous video creators — I truly learned so much!

For addressable RGB LED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7g55VN9HiM

For capacitive touch sensor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTSBXSCFBPs

Thank you for reading this far! Wishing you a wonderful day!