I had my first renegade baking experience was when I was 4. My mom was outside working in the garden, and my friend and I decided that we wanted to ‘bake’ for the first time. Unfortunately, we couldn’t reach the recipes, so we just threw everything in our reach that looked like ingredients in the bowl. But (luckily) we couldn’t reach the stove or the oven, and when she came back inside, she found us with a big bowl full of a green mess.
About 45 minutes after enquiring as to what we had put in the bowl, our green monster cake came out of the oven. She had magically turned it into a verdant, yet quite tasty spice cake (a miracle, quite possibly, as the two items I recall within reaching distance from our fridge in those days were anchovy paste and Aquavit).
Why is that memorable? It taught me creativity and ingenuity in the kitchen can sometimes lead to fantastic, although slightly bizzare results. Thanks to that fantastic experience, to this day I’m hard pressed to follow a recipe to the letter. I have an appreciation for all types of cuisine, and I’m open to the bizzare.
And I really like green food.
But now I have a problem. I’m addicted to books full of fantastic diy projects – various forms of knitting, electronics, sewing, glasswork, cookbooks… but I never seem to actually MAKE anything from those shelves full of books, taking up so much valuable space and collecting dust in my tiny San Francisco apartment.
I justify my addiction by claiming I use the books as reference material, as inspiration, as a resource for acquiring new techniques… but still, I never use them as originally intended. Even if I do try my hand at a pattern, a recipe, or a circuit from the pages of those books, the original intent of the author gets lost somewhere along the way, subverted in favor of my own ideas. Sometimes they work… and sometimes they don’t (as evidenced by my large storage container full of unfinished circuits, my drawers of partially completed mutant sweaters). I want to make it my own, fulfilling my own vision. As my mom likes to remind me, my favorite phrase until the age of 5 was “me do my myself,” when it was replaced with other various phrases as I became a bit more grammatically adept.
Regardless, it’s the process of creation that I enjoy. I don’t want to blindly follow directions, I want to engage the ideas of the author, collaborating in the creation of something new, something novel.
For this reason, I instantly fell in love with Fashioning Technology, a book from the makers of Craft and Make Zines. Not only does it integrate my two great loves (crafting and geekery), it’s beautifully laid out, and chock-full of useful information for integrating electronics into wearable, huggable designs.
It has enough information for the budding SmartCrafter to grasp a basic understanding of the science behind circuit design, but focuses on the “how” rather than the “why.” And for those of us that learn better through example than explication, that’s a good thing. You’ll have to find another reference if you want to move on to more complex projects, but this is a great place to start.
Fashioning Technology also includes descriptions of the components, including some topics I haven’t seen addressed in other diy circuitry books:
- solder leads onto solar cell fragments so that you can get them more cheaply
- how to hack into all of those old power adapters you still have from long-gone cell phones and other small appliances to provide power for your projects
- making your own resistors.
- making switches from snaps, zippers, magnets and grommets
- making momentary “soft” switches from conductive material
- etching your own circuitboards
Although I don’t envision myself making any projects directly from this book, it’s such a great reference that it’s retaining one of the few places of honor on my end table.
More about the book beyond the cut.
Topics covered in Fashioning Technology:
The Basics
Materials and Tools:
- Conductive and Smart Materials
- Industrial materials
- Overview of electronic components
- What you need in your toolbox
Why stuff works:
- LEDs
- Simple circuits
- Choosing and hacking into power supplies
- Soldering (and desoldering!)
- Screen printing (using photographic emulsion)
- Sewing soft circuits
- Troubleshooting
The Projects:
Things to wear:
- LED bracelet (or cuffs, for the gents)
- “Rock Star Headphones” a soft headband with built-in headphones
- Space Invaders tote bag – lights up to let you know when your cell phone rings
- Aerial the Birdie Brooch – don’t fully understand this one, but it has the coolest circuit board design EVER!
Things for the house:
- Photochromic Blinds - remember Hypercolors t-shirts? Substitute UV-radiation for body heat and you’ll get the concept.
- Luminescent Tea Table – glow-in-the-dark screenprinting on a cardboard nightstand.
- LED Chandelier – a modern replacement for those of us without the original crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling of our Victorian flats.
- Rock ‘N’ Roll Speakers – powered by a 9-volt battery with an ingenious on-off mechanism
Things to play with:
- Emoting Electronic Finger Puppets – they blush (LEDs), tremble (vibrating motor), and spew fire (fiber optics). If any of my friends ever have offspring, guess what they’re getting for their birthdays!
- Glam the Glo Bug – so much cooler than the GloWorm dolls of the 80s (was I the only one who thought those looked less like gloworms, and more like maggots?), Glam lights up when the lights go down. On his own.
- A sonorous Solar Crawler – remember the toy kitchens and lawnmowers every church day care had to teach us how to fit into our gender roles? The solar crawler is kind of the same as those lawnmowers, except instead of pushing this, you pull. And instead of lawn-mower-y sounds, the built-in flexible solar panel translates solar energy into song.
- Hanging Mobile – kinetic sculpture using shape memory alloys to control the movement of the mobile.
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