Sonic Patchwork by Rylie Sweem

Most of the women in my family are crafters, everyone with their own skill sets and abilities. As I've gotten older, I've tried to explore these types of crafts in an effort to connect more with them. Inspired by my grandmother and wanting to learn something new, I started knitting a few years ago. In an effort to push the boundaries of traditional knitting, I explored the use of conductive yarn as sensors to create a different experience with a knitted piece.

My e-textile is a knit patchwork piece, where wool and conductive yarn are intertwined. I wanted to play with the sound of stretch and how textiles might sound when being interacted with. This swatch is comprised of three different stretch sensors, varying in size, and direction. As you stretch or compress the fabric, the tone output changes. The tones can be manipulated by stretching each sensor differently, stretching different combinations of sensors, and the overall stretch direction.

To make this swatch, I selected four types of wool with varying thicknesses and knit them into rectangles of varying sizes, using a patchwork diagram I made for scale reference. For three of the sections, I also knit in a few rows of conductive yarn – giving me three sensors. Each end of the sensor was capped with some conductive tape, which would allow me to solder later. I stitched the knit pieces together to complete the entire piece, and soldered my circuit together. I then used an Arduino Uno to map sensor values to unique tones, which plays from a small speaker on the back side of the swatch. Overall, the swatch aims to amplify textile stretch properties, specifically in a knit context.

Materials List: wool yarn, conductive yarn, conductive tape, Arduino Uno

References: Material Expressions No. 2 by Laura Splan, Ett stycke i ett stycke by Lise-Lotte Norelius and Ann Rosén, Knitting Music by Samantha Topley