There are a lot of tutorials online around creating LED shirts, but generally, you’ll find that they are fiddly and time-consuming, expensive after all the costs, or just not durable. None of these points works well in a kid’s workshop, but at least it looks good!
Still, we wanted to offer this workshop to kids while, keeping it low cost, easy for kids to create and most importantly, having them take home their creation after 30 minutes.
We came up with just simple white cotton shirts that the kids will colour in with fabric pens. The shirts are powered by a simple LED 1m strip that is waterproof and powered by 4 AAA batteries. The battery pack has an on/off/motion sensor switch, which works well. To simplify LED installation, we sewed fabric sleeves on the inside of the shirt so the kids could easily slide the LED strips onto each shirt, easy peasy. This also allows mum (or dad) to take out the LEDs and wash the shirt too!
The total cost of each shirt came in at around $15 each (plus the time to sew the fabric sleeves) which we thought was a pretty good price.
The kids had a lot of fun and took home their creations. We even saw a few proudly wearing them around the local shopping centre later that night (well you could not miss them with the flashing LEDs!)