New Textiles 2012

This week our assignment was to:

Construct a color changing textile using: white cotton fabric, thermochromic ink, stainless steel thread, a switch, and a rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery.

I have illustrated the tools and the process I went through in the following drawings and images…

Thermochromic Ink, Fabric Painting medium, and acrylic paints

Thermochromic Paint

stainless steel thread, a switch, rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery

Stitching done with conductive thread

Cups with paints and fabric medium

Paints after mixing..

Painting over the conductive thread stitching..

Experimenting with the mixing of colors and the effects of temperature

After stitching my circuit and painting it, and leaving it to dry, I tried running current through it to see the color change. Turns out… the color was not changing! Yikes! Now came the troubleshooting that had to be done. With Leah’s advice I checked my battery to ensure there was enough volts in it, and there was. She then pointed out to me that the length of my circuit (the length of stitching) was more than likely too long and that I would need to shorten it. After testing that hypothesis using alligator clips to shorten the run of my circuit, it worked! Color changing was happening.

Photo BEFORE current passes through the thread

Photo AFTER current has started passing through thread... note color change

In the end I decided to reduce the length of my circuit by eliminating two columns of colors (green and red) and let me circuit only pass through the blue paint. I also increased the amount of stitching between the switches to reduce resistance.

This work by Vernelle Noel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.