The Puss Puss night light is now complete!
The Story
The Puss Puss night light is made to encourage sex positivity for young female adults and let them be more confident and embrace their body. People often don’t view human genitals the same way like other body parts. But artists have been exploring the visual relationship between female genital and natural elements, such as flowers with pebbles, the cut of a strawberry and many other fruits. The layered structures of these beautiful natural elements could help it become easier to view our own body parts.
The Puss Puss light is designed to be put by your bed or pillow. It looks like a vagina from the front view, but is in the shape of a flower when looked from an angle. The surprise outcome is that it also looks like an octopus from the side! The toy lights up with yellow lights and gives a warm feel to the room at night.
The Process
I bought my fabric from New York Fabrics in Bushwick. A really nice lady helped me explore different material and colors.
The end product used 8 yellow LED lights, 1 battery pack, and 4 different fabrics. The darkest color (dark purple) is very soft and stretchy, the second darkest color, the maroon fabric, is thicker and more durable, the burnt orange fabric is silky, and the lightest pick fabric is soft and fluffy.
I started the project with soldering the lights to make sure my circuit works well. Having 8 lights is tough! The hardest part with the light is to connect the 8 light with the really thin battery pack wire – it broke once in the middle of my sewing later, and my solder is so fat that the heat-shrink tube could barely fit… I connected all the positives of the lights with the resistor so it’s easy to recognize them even after the tube shrink after heating. And luckily – the light worked!
I sewed the light from the inner layer to the outer layer. Except from the middle layer, every other layer comes together with two pieces rounding the inner layer like two piece of lips. Something new I tried was to explore how light comes thought different materials – and with the darker and thicker material, it barely comes through. So I had to change my plan of using an acrylic board to defuse the light. Instead, I put one light on the tip of the middle layer (and yes, that’s the clit), and two lights in each of the two outer layers. The thick cotton defuses the light pretty well in my case.
Something challenging was that I couldn’t plan for the side of each layer upfront. For each of the layer I cut, I had to refer to its inner layer in size so the outer layer can wrap around the inner layer well.
The other challenging part was sewing around the soldered wires at the bottom of the lamp. To stick the light inside the sewed pieces, I had to leave a small opening for each piece, and sewing it close around the wire wasn’t the easiest. But because this part doesn’t show on the outside of the lamp, I didn’t need to do a super clean job – it just had to close and stay stable.
To have the light be able to stand on a table, I created a back bubble when I’m cutting the most outer layer, this is where the other 3 lights stays and where the battery pack is.
After sewing the back close, voila! The Puss Puss Light is finished!
Currently this light sits by my pillows along with my other toys.
My cat Haydn likes it 🙂
If I had more time, I think I would solder the wire better at where it connects to the battery pack. I would also add two more LEDs to the back of the light so that the top part of the back can lights up. But I love how it is now!