Silver Glow Fur Jacket

Today I finished my first glow-fur project.  It's a glowing silver-and-white fur lined jacket, and the cuffs and collar fur glow with delicious rainbow colors and animations.

I used Adafruit's Gemma chip along with their neopixels and neopixel strips.  The jacket is powered by a lithium polymer battery that's surprisingly light and really strong.  I think I'm hooked on lithium polymer.  This thing is awesome.

This jacket was kind of a nightmare to make.  Electronics can be so petulant if they don't get exactly what they want, when they want it, and prototypes are notoriously fiddly anyway even without the electricity to muddle things up.  I remade almost every part of this jacket at least twice, and I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, but I am 500% HAPPY with it.

The cool thing about using the Adafruit pixels is that each one is individually addressable.  What does that mean?  It means that I can plug this jacket into my Mac, and tell it what color combinations I want, or what animations it should run, or how bright it should be or any number of wonderful things.  If I want it fading from purple to red to purple I can do that, or I can let the rainbow colors shine.  

I've also got the option of adding on motion sensors, color sensors, or GPS sensors (so I can have it light up when I get to Starbucks, or whatever - I haven't quite figured out the why's of that one yet).  There's so much to learn.  It's a little overwhelming. 

But right now I have a sparkly rainbow light up jacket.  Squee!

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Flower Faerie Hoodie Improvements & Updates

Just finished up this gorgeous Flower Faerie hoodie to ship off to the East Coast this morning.  This one was custom ordered with longer sleeves and no laces on the sides.  It's always fun to make modifications.  This is the second request I've gotten for no side laces and it makes it a rather different hoodie, I think.  Certainly it fits differently.  I like the clean lines of it quite a lot.

I'm also getting a little faster.  This one is my best seller and I've made quite a few of them at this point.  I think I maybe have shaved at least an hour or maybe two hours off the total creation time (so, down to 5-6 hours from 7-8 hours).  Details take time! 

(Also, the side laces take a lot of time.  Maybe that's why I finished this one so quickly)

I keep making teensy improvements too.  My serger does a lot of different types of seams and I keep changing my mind as to which seam type I like best for which seam.  I think my choices are getting better and better. 

For any sewing geeks who might be reading this, I use a Babylock Imagine serger.  It's got a feed differential, which means it can sew two pieces of fabric together at different "speeds" - i.e. it makes gathers or ruffles automatically.  The other cool thing it does is make "lettuce edges" if I sew just one layer of fabric on a stretch differential.  Like this.. see how the sleeve edge is wiggly?

Anyway, that's one thing I've started doing with the later versions of this hoodie, and I think it adds a lot.  Another thing is the way I assemble the wrist cuff.. the way I was doing it before, I ended up with a little uneven jag at the end of the wrist cuff, often as not, and I reworked it so the edges come out even and hidden this time.  It's those little things that make me so happy.

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Magickal Circle Hoodie

After the brains fiasco, I went ahead and kept working on this hoodie (since it was already mostly cut and on the sewing table).   I decided to scrap all the brain fabric altogether and go a slightly different route.  I ended up with something exceptionally classy.

I stuck with the circles idea but decided to do them with embroidery instead.  I also went for a high collar, which turned into a nehru jacket sort of look after a little prompting from Darrell, and ended up forgoing the hood altogether (so.. it's not a hoodie I guess.. what does that make it?).


I repeated the circle symbol motif around the collar, on the sleeves and then put a big one on the back.  I have always wanted to embroider something large on the back of a hoodie, but when there's a hood, it always covers that spot, so I was happy to have the opportunity this time.   And it looks wonderful!!  Yay!

Darrell really really wants a man-version of this one.  He saw me working on it and got all excited, so I will probably do it.

This hoodie turned out too small for me.  I can squeeze into it, but I'm too tall and too broad through the shoulders to really do it justice.  This will look great on a little goth girl.  I need to find a little goth girl who can come and be my model.

And, so it begins again... the quest for the perfect new hoodie for ME.  Last year I did the same thing.. made several different ones that just weren't *quite* the exact thing I wanted.. but hey, at least it populates the etsy store.

So!  What do I call this one?  It's slightly witchy.. a little halloweeny.. but still classy.  Right now I'm thinking "Coven Jacket" or "Magickal Circle Hoodie" .. any suggestions?

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