If you’re so accident-prone that your clothes are always getting ripped, but you aren’t handy enough to mend those rips, the future holds some pretty good news for you. Designer Ingrida Kazenaite has come up with a concept that would let anyone quickly and easily repair damaged clothing, even if they’ve never before picked up a needle and thread.

The Fabric Pen is a kind of small-scale garment 3-D printer. On one end, controls let you scan the material you want to match and choose the printing function that will repair the damage.

Pressing a button releases a spray-on fabric that mends the rip. The nano-material attaches itself to the fabric’s threads, matching the texture and pattern perfectly. When you change out of the garment, you can choose to leave the repair in place and wear it over and over or just remove and dissolve it.

The conceptual product is meant to cut down on the amount of clothing that is needlessly discarded every year. By repairing rather than replacing, we can greatly reduce the amount of material entering the waste stream before its useful life is over.

The Fabric Pen clearly isn’t ready for real-world production just yet, but the concept perfectly illustrates the type of product that could change the way we use our resources in the future.

The post Sew Simple: Fabric Pen Mends Clothes, No Needle Needed first appeared on Gajitz.

With so many mundane items suddenly taking on digital life, it stands to reason that even textiles will eventually be digital in some form or another. Budapest-based textile artist Judit Eszter Karpati recently designed a fabric called Chromosonic which changes color when exposed to heat and sound.

Chromosonic is a programmable electronic textile that reacts to heat using the open-source Arduino platform. Karpati first covered the fabric in silkscreen and then colored it with a heat-sensitive dye. The next step was weaving wires into the fabric and connecting them so that when music is played, the wires heat up and create color-shifting patterns.

Karpati’s inspiration came from her desire to meld the physical and the digital. Her textile creation could, if adopted by the fashion industry, create some amazing new options for designers. The idea of integrating technology into clothing doesn’t stop with Karpati’s color-changing fabric, however. It is a positive step toward next-generation wearables in which we can combine clothing and electronic devices like phones, watches, and music players, which is an idea that some other designers have already expressed interest in developing.

The post Wired Color-Changing Fabric Reacts to Heat and Sound first appeared on Gajitz.

In the desert, spiders use their webs to capture moisture from the nightly fogs. This environmental water would be unavailable for drinking without the intelligent use of readily-available materials. It was this adaptive use that inspired researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology to create a specially coated cotton that can capture moisture from nightly fogs and turn it into perfectly pure drinking water as the sun warms it. Under normal conditions, cotton can only absorb 18 percent of its weight in moisture. After applying a polymer to the cotton known as PNIPAAm, the cloth is able to absorb an amazing 340 percent of its own weight in liquid.

The coated cotton is hydrophilic (or absorbent) at lower temperatures, but when it warms up it is hydrophobic – it actually repels water. In the image above, the fibers on the left are the cotton in a hydrophilic state and those on the right are the cotton in its hydrophobic state. In the desert, this fabric would absorb the fogs that roll in overnight, and as the sun rises and warms the fabric the moisture would effectively be squeezed out by the fabric itself into a waiting receptacle below. The water is safe to consume and the polymer-coated cotton stands up to repeated uses. The researchers are now just looking for ways to improve the fabric’s performance – then we may see it used to make moisture-collecting tents or athletic clothing that that keeps sweat away from skin.

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Imagine for a moment that you’re a thief bent on stealing something really valuable – is a piece of cloth really going to seem like a dangerous barrier? It might be just that once the smart fabric developed at Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM makes its way into real-world settings. The fabric is made of regular fibers on regular weaving equipment, but it has a couple of key differences. First, there is a network of silver-coated conductive threads running through the fabric and connected to a microcontroller. Secondly, this bad-ass fabric can tell you if it’s been cut – and precisely where the cut is.

The advance in secure textiles could be used in a very wide number of settings. It could be built into the walls of banks or museums, or used to cover valuable loads in trucks. The electric current passing through the fabric is so weak that it would not harm humans or animals near it (or even cutting through it), but it is just strong enough to sense a disruption in the energy. As long as the fabric measures at least one meter square, it can be scaled to any size – and it only costs about as much as a regular piece of fabric of the same size. Even repeated washing, extreme temperatures and high humidity can’t dampen the usefulness of the researchers’ futuristic new fabric.

The post Smart Protective Fabric Tells Exact Locations of Breaches first appeared on Gajitz.

If you’re in a fairly dangerous line of work, full-time body armor might be the wisest way to go. But for the rest of us, there just aren’t many times when body armor is practical. A fabric called Deflexion could help provide protection only when it’s needed, remaining soft and flexible at all other times.

The fabric is made by Dow Corning out of a special type of polymerized silicon. The material differs from regular silicone in that it’s normally flexible, but when hit with an impact the molecules group together and turn solid in the blink of an eye. The newly-solid material absorbs the impact and protects the wearer just like traditional body armor. Just as quickly as it went solid, the material turns flexible again.

Deflexion can be cut, sewn, washed and worn just like any other type of fabric, making it ideal for everyday applications like sports gear, shoes or impact-proof gadget cases. It provides protection without bulk, all while boasting an extremely futuristic scientific makeup.

The post Instantly-Hardening Fabric Protects Only When Needed first appeared on Gajitz.