Introduction to E-textiles
Workshop with Lee Jones & Greta Grip
Join Lee Jones & Greta Grip for a workshop exploring textiles and circuitry! Presented in conjunction with with their 2023 Media Art + Technology Residency Exhibition, in partnership with the Manitoba Craft Council.Â
Saturday June 24Â |Â 2:00 - 4:00 pm
@ The Output, 2nd Floor 100 Arthur St.Â
E-textiles and having electronics in your clothes might sound like science-fiction but are actually a fun and easy way to learn all about electricity and building sensors. E-textiles combine learning craft techniques (such as sewing, weaving, knitting and crocheting) with the added excitement of making a circuit work.
In this introductory workshop individuals will learn all about soft circuits and get the chance to make their own light up bookmark using an e-textile stitch sampler [1]. This workshop will cover the basics of sewing with conductive thread, how to build your circuit, and sewing tools and techniques you can use to put everything together. No prior knowledge of electronics or sewing is required for this workshop. Beginners welcome!
[1] Lee Jones and Audrey Girouard. 2022. Learning with Stitch Samplers: Exploring Stitch Samplers as Contextual Instructions for E-textile Tutorials. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 949–965. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533488
COST - Free!
Greta Grip enjoys pulling the strings of what is traditional knitting and winding it around the digital age. Greta started to exhibit her knitted food in 2009, since then her practice has evolved from knitting QR codes to EL wire. Currently, Grip knits with her hacked knitting machine. Hacked it by removing its original brain and replacing it with an USB port. Focused on a practice of exploring the use of layering texts and symbols, colours and textures; foregoing the unfinished and flawed, Grip’s work challenges the understanding of what knitting is supposed to look like. Her signature labels: A treasure to remember by Greta Grip is the finale as she once again pokes fun at the seriousness of what is art.
Lee Jones is a postdoctoral fellow with the iStudio Lab at Queen’s University. Before joining the lab, she did her PhD at the Creative Interactions Lab at Carleton University, where her thesis focused on e- textiles, hybrid craft, and textile personal fabrication. In her research she develops DIY toolkits so individuals can design and create interactive soft technologies to suit their own needs. She also loves running community e-textile workshops at art galleries and makerspaces, and creating interactive participatory artworks.
