Today Sasha and I got right to work. We 3D printed a bigger button and put it together with springs and and nails. We had to drill through it a bit because some of the holes, didn’t go all the way through. We cut the wire in half but didn’t put it into the button yet. We printed out our design for the felt and realized that where the corners of the stars and diamonds met, there was just a gap so we made the stars smaller. We also added holes for the eyelets. Rosa and Emily suggested we transfer the hexagonal pattern to the arm pieces, so we worked on those. It was frustrating to move and copy all the eyelets and then trim so that it looked good. In the end, I think we found a good pattern. I hope that tomorrow we can actually put the dress together with the electronic part and see if it works.

Today we made our second iteration and started working on our third. We realized that holes in the felt could rip easily. We decided to use cardboard with holes in it just like the arm pieces and put them down the side of the dress for the twine to go through. We screwed the pieces to the dress and put yarn through the cardboard. The problem was it wasn’t very stable because the cardboard would get pulled in but the dress wouldn’t. We thought we could add more screws but it would still be uncomfortable. With Rosa’s help, we realized that the best option was if the string went through the fabric itself and we could design a special eyelet so the the felt wouldn’t rip. I designed hexagon shaped eyelet with little hexagons around it, the pattern was meant to represent a turtle’s shell. We laser cut the eyelets with four small holes for screws that go through the fabric and connect to the eyelet part on the other side of the fabric. Sasha realized that the middle hexagons were too big, so we changed the design a bit so that there was a smaller circle for the string to go through.