Pay it Forward Note Books + Soft Circuits

I had a chance yesterday to do some crafting with my long time crafty friend Beth. Beth rules because her response to any potential craft project is ”We can totally make that.” We spent a delightful afternoon rewatching Bride and Prejudice and making these notebooks. We were actually killing two birds with one stone because Beth also writes extensively about Bollywood movies (including for the Wall Street Journal) and we are collaborating on a unit for my 10th grade English class that compares Bollywood adaptations to their 19th Century British literature sources (so far Bride and Prejudice and Ashta Chamma, an adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest).

Originally I thought I would sew something for this project, but I saw these notebooks shortly after I agreed to swap graph paper with Maitreya. This was such a fun project to shows off the cool variety of papers she sent. I didn’t have old library cards to use as a cover, so I used card stock and embellished them by hand stitching fabric scraps and sometimes adding additional embroidery to the scraps. I bound with staples but then covered the spine with washi tape to give it a more polished look. These will go out to Monica, Jamie, and Suzee on Tuesday. More views of the notebooks can be found on flickr.

On Wednesday night I went to a workshop with Becky Stern of CRAFT and MAKE and learned about sewing soft circuits. You can see me holding up my first project, which is really just learning how to make circuits that work. The conductive thread is pretty straightforward to sew with and even I remembered enough of fifth grade to make the parallell circuit. Now I need to figure out who on my Christmas list needs a gift that lights up.

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