Friday, October 27, 10am – 1pm
Length: 3 hours Open to the public – Pre-registration required
Struts Gallery, 7 Lorne St.
This workshop is part of No Ceiling: It's About Time
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!
Pre-register by emailing admin@strutsgallery.ca with subject line: Intro to E-textiles [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
About the artists
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. More on her page: GretaGrip.com
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. More on her page: LeeJones.ca
Greta and Lee have been an artistic duo since 2019. We have collaborated in several public art installations, exhibitions, residencies, peer-reviewed publications, and have received grants for our interactive, participatory, tangible art. Our interest in public art is with works that are controlled by and respond to the audience. We also continue our interest in how we can activate art spaces during the pandemic. Data is of particular interest to our practice because of all the invisible data sources and sensors that capture us throughout the day without us noticing. But visualized data can also encourage us to reflect on how we perceive and react to the data. In our practice we aim to make this data visible and tangible. We are interested in community participation, and making tinkering with technology accessible to broader audiences. More on our page: Everydayetextiles.com