Color Changing Pressable Fabric

By Laura
Director of the Unstable Design Lab and AdaCAD development
Color Changing Pressable Fabric

Weave with Regions of Press Sensing and Color Change

  • Designed and Woven by Laura Devendorf
  • Electronics and PCB Designed by Chad Di Lauro

Summary

This fabric uses a double woven structure and inlay techniques to create three adjacent regions that can sense press and change color in response. We used a stainless steel conductive yarn to integrate press pads into the back of the double layer weave, and a custom made color changing yarn integrated into the front face of the weave. The weave is designed such that all of the connecting wires are routed to the left side of the fabric. We developed a custom PCB and code that can sense the pressing and provide power to the appropriate regions. Additionally, we made a custom prototype with 9 total sections (3 consecutive sections of this pattern) that can be controlled by pressing or by a musical controller called a “Monome”, which allows someone to essentially use button inputs to control the color pattern on the fabric.

Equipment Specifics

This fabric was woven by hand on an 8 shaft baby wolf, warped at 20 ends per inch with 10/2 pearl cotton. The weave is 300 ends wide (15” wide). Note, the tie up for this draft supports most of the weaving operations, but integrating the color changing sections was accomplished by hand during the weaving process by alternating the types of yarn along the row.

Yarns

  • Stainless Steel Conductive Thread (Button)
  • Custom Made Thermochromic Yarns (details to making this thread can be found in the additional resources section) (Thermochromic)
  • 10/2 Pearl Cotton in Natural (Regular Yarn)

Weaving Files

Shuttles

Weaving each section requires 12 shuttles to be in use at one time. We label the shuttles below and color code them in the draft

  1. Regular Yarn 1 (R1) - for use on the top layer of the double weave
  2. Regular Yarn 2 (R2) - for use on the bottom layer of the double weave
  3. Regular Yarn 3 (R3) - for use on the top layer in regions where a thermochromic regions splits the left and right sides of the fabric
  4. Button 1/Top (B1/T) - integrated as a supplemental warp in the first button segment
  5. Button 1/Bottom (B1/B) - for use creating the first press region on the bottom layer of the double weave
  6. Button 2/Top (B2/T) - integrated as a supplemental warp in the second button segment
  7. Button 2/Bottom (B2/B) - for use creating the second press region on the bottom layer of the double weave
  8. Button 3/Top (B3/T) - integrated as a supplemental warp in the second button segment
  9. Button 3/Bottom (B3/B) - for use creating the thrid press region on the bottom layer of the double weave
  10. Thermochromic 1 (C1) - for the first color changing region
  11. Thermochromic 2 (C2) - for the second color changing region
  12. Thermochromic 3 (C3) - for the third color changing region

Final Results

Animation

Additional Resources