Author: Becky Stern

I love to make things and share them. I live in New York City and when I'm not making or publishing, I ride bikes and motorcycles. I love my pit bull dogs. I'm a full-time content creator and also teach part-time at SVA. Find me as @bekathwia on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.

Hacking the Brother KH-930e knitting machine

Limor “Ladyada” Fried and I just finished up an extensive tutorial on hacking the Brother KH-930e knitting machine. We show you how to make your own cable for interfacing with the machine, then how to use it to put custom patterns on the machine without entering them by hand, as I had been doing previously (one excruciating pixel at a time). I made the above tessellating adafruits fabric and the dithering experiment below.

Have questions? Don’t ask them here or send me email, ask in the adafruit forum.

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La Roux Halloween costume

Yep, this year for Halloween I dressed up as Elly Jackson from La Roux.

Last year on the MAKE YouTube channel, commenters started saying I looked like the singer from the English synth-pop duo La Roux. Here’s how to get the Mondrian jacket look from the video for their song Bulletproof.

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac Mondrian jacket tutorial Instructables, “neo-cameo” laser cutter files on Thingiverse (C&D), and I commissioned the leggings from Trendy Love on Etsy.

More photos on Flickr.

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Sock Zombies!

A while back for my birthday, Sarah Hatton made me a “sock zombie” plush toy from whatever she had laying around… a tube sock, some red thread, sewing machine bobbins, and some eyeshadow. I made it into a tutorial video for CRAFT’s Halloween series.

Filmed less than a week after my invasive knee surgery (pics), here’s a behind-the-scenes pic by Brian Redbeard.

Firefox Necklace

My favorite browser, in 18ga. Sterling silver, video for CRAFT. To get the foxy template, check out Tobi Leingruber’s Foxbling on Thingiverse

I used rubber cement to affix the template to a piece of 18ga. silver sheet, and used a small saw to cut out the shape on top of a jewelry maker’s bench pin, which is that fork-shaped wooden surface you see in the video. Finish it up with files and a lot of sanding using a flex shaft and slotted mandrel. The same flex shaft can be fitted with any number of tools, like the tiny drill bit I used to drill the pendant’s jumpring hole. I got most of the tools and supplies for this project from Rio Grande, who also buys back my scrap metal.

If you like this post, you may be interested in some of my others:

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