Crafting Tools for Textile Electronic Making

This abstract introduces a set of tools for electronic textile crafts. The goal is to combine established textile craft routines with electronic functionalities while avoiding being limited to either crafting or engineering qualities. A discipline's toolset is decisive in what material can be handled and what output can be produced as well as the skills needed to handle it. New tools presented here allow for new interactions with materials and make new routines accessible to the processes of electronic making and textile crafting, potentially being inclusive to new user groups in the respective fields. Here, traditional needlecraft tools are adapted to integrate electric engineering needs. Functionally, these tools augment processes of textile crafting with information about electric properties of the artifact in production. More broadly, they are a chance to reflect on the roles and cultural assumptions of the technologies, and indeed crafts, that these tools enable.