Smart Upcycled Bib Necklace

Smart Upcycled Necklace by Agatha Lee is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Based on a work at http://greenissuessingapore.blogspot.sg/. 

I've always wanted to make a bib necklace but didn't get around to doing it as I wasn't really sure what materials to use. Then a friend passed me an old jean skirt that no longer fitted her toddler.  I used the jeans as the necklace base and strengthened it with felt. I added black lace scraps from the upcycled LBD project, a few Swarovski crystals (a few because they were so expensive!) and a couple of craft gems.  The project was finished off with a black ribbon.

To give the project a sparkle, I sewed on the LilyPad board, light sensor and LED lights. This project glows when it is dim or dark, and flickers when it is bright. You don't have to do the electronics, but I think I'm hooked ever since doing the blink bike bag! Read below for the tutorial.

PS: If you would like to see this in person, do drop by the Arduino Day on Saturday!

Upcycling My Umbrella to a Blinky Bike Bag

When it comes to cycling, we always think of safety first. We have our helmets and our bike reflector vest, but somehow, my hubby always forgets the vest but remembers the helmet. That really doesn't make sense!  So, when my umbrella broke I decided to make a bike bag with reflectors on it. The bag would be a permanent fixture on the bike. Then I thought why not sew in some blinky LED lights. 

I got really excited but after a while, I lost interest in the project. The umbrella sat in my store room for a while until last week when one of the co-founders, Veera, from Sustainable Living Lab suggested I venture into wearable technology.  My reactions were "I don't know programming code!" and "I failed physics!", but then I just decided to dive straight into it. What's more, I had the umbrella to bike bag to work on, right?