soundie: a musical touch-sensitive light-up hoodie

Step 11 Insulate your stitching

Insulate your traces.
Although your garment now works, you'll find that when you wear it next to your skin, it'll create a buzzing sensation. Also, if you wear it too often, the conductive thread on the inside of the garment may begin to fuzz and the little hairs might cause shorts to occur. To prevent shorts from developing, you'll want to insulate the conductive traces on the inside of your garment.

Once you make sure that all parts of your garment are functioning properly and ensure that you have no shorts, it's time to insulate your stitches. To do this, you can put puffy fabric paint over the stitches on the inside of your garment, or you can iron iron-on adhesive fabric onto the inside of the jacket to cover the inside traces. I used the second method, because my hoodie had many feet of traces. Also, with iron-on adhesive fabrics, you can easily reheat and remove the fabric if you made a mistake or need to fix a trace.

You'll want to make sure that your stitches look neat on the outside before covering any of your traces permanently. To do this, tug on the stitches on the inside of your garment and be sure the outside stitches look straight. Then, cut adhesive fabric to fit the traces on your garment, and iron it on.

Before ironing anything over the inner traces, make sure that everything works so that you aren't making any shorts permanent!