Glinda the Good Witch; LED Skirt

Out of this whole costume the skirt took the longest simply due to the fact that I really wanted it to light up and stitching tons of LED wires by hand is really really slow.

The skirt is 2 layers, the bottom layer is smooth, pink, pearlized, sheer fabric.  It is a basic A-line cut gathered into a pink elastic waist band.  The simple cut let me stitch LED strings all over this base skirt.  The LEDs are Flora RGB neopixels from Adafruit, these can produce full 24-bit color, are ultra-bright, can be chained together and can respond rapidly to programmed instructions.  Each stand in the skirt is 8 Flora neopixels strung together with clear wire and there are 8 strands.  You can use conductive threads for these, but the loss in conductivity over the length of the skirt would be too much, so for this size project, I used wire.  Once wired, I stitched the LED strands to the skirt.  The stitching pattern was random and the strands were designed to have different spacing between the LEDs to make it a little more organic looking.

 The wiring all runs to a pouch under the bustled overskirt which is high enough that I don't sit on it, but low enough that it is not under the corset.  The Arduino controller and the LiPo batteries are held in this pouch.

The overskirt is much fuller than the underskirt and is made of crinkled, pink, pearlized, sheer fabric.   The overskirt is floor length in the front and slightly longer in the back to allow the skirt to be bustled slightly by tapes in the back (you can see 2 of the white ribbon tapes for the bustle in the pouch photo).  The ruffle at the bottom of the skirt goes all the way around the skirt.  To the front of the skirt, I cut out gear shapes in random shiny fabrics I had laying around.  These fabrics were gifted to me and were 1/8 yard strips in 16 colors, I used all the pink tones for this skirt.  These two fabrics (the pearlized sheer and the slippery shiny stuff) were horrible to sew and every attempt I had to applique this stuff failed, so the gears are glued on with fabric glue.

To the back, I added a couple of elements to enhance the bustle, these were based on 1860s fashions were you start to see extra stuff down the back, but the skirts still have fairly round hoop support.  The added bits are pretty free form, there are several layers of basically quarter circles with trim added to the back.

The arduino in the skirt allows the LEDs to have several programs that the skirt cycles through every 30 seconds.  The first is a red raindrop effect, the second one is a blue snow shower effect and the last one is a rainbow blinking effect.

In case the videos aren't working, here is a quick picture of pattern 3.