You already light up a room with your amazing digital making skills, and you can shine even brighter by creating e-textiles! On this week’s episode of Digital Making at Home, we learned about e-textiles — tech that’s part of your clothing. Jessica Stanley, a wearables maker and PhD student from Dublin, Ireland stopped by to explain how she combines her interests in sewing and electronics to make her clothing designs light up, heat up, and even make sounds. How amazing is that?! Fun fact: Jessica was inspired to start experimenting with wearables and e-textiles after watching a video by last week’s special guest, Becky Stern!

We also saw some of the awesome wearables that Jessica has made, including a Modular Leaf Armour. Check out all of Jessica’s projects on her website! As promised, Mr C and Christina gave you a taste of how to start making your own wearables: they used Scratch to show you how to make an LED blink on a Raspberry Pi computer. Then Mr C made a t-shirt with a heart on it and put his blinking LED underneath it so it looked like the heart was beating. You can do many cool things with e-textiles, so give it a try!

We’ll be back for more digital making next Wednesday. See you then!