Plug-and-Wear, a one-stop-shop offering materials and components specifically targeted to eTextile creators has opened it’s shopping doors.

Plug-and-Wear is the brain child of Riccardo Marchesi, Managing Director of InnTex, an Italian based textiles and textiles machinery company with 55+ years experience in the textile industry.

The aim of Plug-and-Wear is to provide a place where wearable electronic designers will find everything needed to create interactive fashion. No need to sign up on different places to collect all the components and information for a wearable electronic project.

For a start, Plug-and-Wear offers around 30 articles ranging from their own light emitting fabrics, sensitive fabrics and conductive textiles to Arduino including the LilyPad with some add-on modules.

According Riccardo the shop will considerable enlarge it’s component and material portfolio in the coming weeks.

I was looking for such an one-stop-shop dedicated to eTextile crafting for some time and I am exited this finally happened. Click over to check out now what’s in store already and watch out for the new stuff to come.

For the convenience of you our dear reader we have added a link on the navigation side of our blog layout to quickly access the Plug-and-Wear shop when working on your next interactive fashion project.

Threadbanger, a network for people who love DIY, recreate, refashion and craft, posted a video and Instructables showing Fashion Nerd Diana Eng teaching the basics of ‘How to Sew with Conductive Thread‘ on the project ‘Robot and Friend’ from her book ‘Fashion Geek‘.

The materials needed for this e-textile beginners guide are easy to organize: fabric for sewing, conductive thread, scissors, two LEDs, CR2032 watch battery, BS7 battery holder, disappearing ink pen, needle-nose pliers, regular thread, wire cutters, and a sewing needle.

I like the use of disappearing ink – it’s a nice trick for drawing the layout/traces for sewing but disappears when you are finished.

If you do not have Diana’s book you can download the Robot and Friend pattern from ThreadBanger.

The combination of the Instructables guide complimented with a video tutorial makes ‘How to Sew with Conductive Thread’ lively and easy to follow.

Nwanua Elumeze from Aniomagic keeps on amazing me with extraordinary smart and simple e-textile components.

The newest addition to the e-textile treasure chest: Button-schemer, an ambient program reader the size of a nickel which is programmable with specially timed flashes of light.

Hold it in front of your computer screen, PDA, iPod Touch or iPhone, in fact any device that can connect to the internet, to load a program to your e-textile object.

How it works in detail: After writing your program within a web-browser, a javascript-based scheme interpreter evaluates it and flashes a part of the screen, sending the program to the Button-schemer.

Because you write and upload your programs directly from a web-browser you don’t need to download special software or use any special hardware. Just write, point, click. Icing on the cake: you can select either programming via text format or via graphical interface.

A brilliant concept which takes away or should I say takes care of all the ‘technical programming stuff’ so one can concentrate fully on designing extraordinary e-textile objects.

The possibilities the Button-schemer offers are amazing: One could embed entire programs in a movie or animation that can influence, change the animation of a smart T-shirt. Best of all, one Button-schemer could program another Button-schemer directly making making e-textile objects truly interactive.

As amazing as the whole concept is as amazing the price: $15.- for one button going down to $12.50 each when you order 10 buttons and just $10.- each for a order of twenty or more.

Japanese love to make everything cute so it is no surprise that softening conventional technology is getting it’s share of cute products.

I like how Japanese using technology in such playful and fun way. The Music Bear iPod Speaker is such an example. Is it a high end speaker system? Properly not. Is it a multi functional remote control for iPod and more? Very likely not.

Is it an object to cheer you and your friends up? Very likely YES. Softening ‘everyday’ objects that are usually cold and hard brings the sunshine into our living area and hearts.

The Music Bear iPod Speaker is operated by batteries (for the sound amplifier) which is stuffed into it’s belly but can also be plugged via USB to any computer.

The cute Music Bear retails for $38.00 via this online store.

If you like to make your own cute Bear remote control by transforming a plastic box remote from off-the-shelf, here is the link for an Instructables that gives you inspiration to get you started.

Life is too short to be taken always too serious – follow the Japanese way of life and soften brighten up your life a bit with soft technologies.

The wait is over, Diana Eng invites to her book launch party with Haute Tech fashion show tomorrow, March 19, in NYC.

Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech is shipping now, get your copy and indulge into the many projects the content table of the book lists like ‘Get-the-Message Bag’, ‘Light-up Petal Purse’, ‘Headphone Hoodie’, ‘Lightning Bug Costume’ and more.

Diana Eng belongs to a new generation tech fashion designer who combines technology, math and science with design. She got into the public spotlight with her participation in Project Runway Season 2.

Since then she dedicates part of her time/creativity to explore technology for fashion designer and surprises with beautiful designs that keep always a practical touch to it, one could say: ‘ready-to-wear interactive fashion’.

Her close relation to the crafting community (she is also contributor to Craft: magazine) might have been her motivation to share the experience and tips with the e-textile crafting community.

As teaser for what we can expect to find in Diana’s Fashion Geek book she has posted a video how to make a light up shoe which is described in the book. The video shows only how four light animated shoes will look like in action.

An exiting reading weekend is ahead of me as UPS tells me my copy will arrive ‘within the next 2 days’. Stay tuned for a review of Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech here on talk2myShirt.

Hannah Perner-Wilson added a cute little DIY project to her growing Instructables collection: the Fabric & Bead Tilt Sensing Bracelet.

What does the bracelet do? It is decorated with six conductive fabric petals and a thread of beads with a metal bead at the end.

Designed to make (electrical) contact when the metal bead is inside one of the conductive petals and when the bead ends up between two petals results in twelve position indicators.

It is up to your creativity and fantasy to find a useful or fun application where you can use this instruction. Controlling light or sound effects on clothing related to arm movement could be one example but I guess there will be a long list of things to do with this idea.

What I like on Hannah’s step-by-step overview is the creative way how to jump from the textile electronic to the ‘hard’ world of conventional electronic. A simple but effective ‘interposer’ to connect to a standard Arduino board. This can be very useful for testing out new projects before integrating the electronic more seamlessly via the LilyPad Arduino.

I give a special thumbs-up to the tip of using a nail clipper to cut off component legs

The complete material shopping list and tools requirement can be found on her Instructables together with the very detailed step-by-step instruction how to build your own tilt sensor bracelet.