In college, Christina Ernst discovered something unexpected: a dress could teach coding. She entered a hackathon with a Bluetooth-controlled, color-changing gown. She saw how fashion and wearables could capture attention and make coding and electronics engaging and accessible for a whole new audience.

Bringing STEM and Fashioneering to a New Audience

During her senior year of college, Christina created a book of craft projects aimed at middle-school girls. To this day, teaching and open sourcing are central to her maker philosophy. She is a four-time award winner at instructables.com for sharing free instructional content, and her tutorials have been featured in ‘Make: Magazine’. Christina aims to inspire others, especially girls who already enjoy sewing or fashion, to see themselves in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). By designing wearable items that people can create, she hopes to encourage more individuals to become makers.

Christina founded She Builds Robots, which offers projects and tutorials on “fashioneering,” the imaginative blend of fashion and engineering for wearable technology. By working with fabric, circuits, and code, she shares both the creative aspects and the trial-and-error process, helping makers navigate the fashion design learning curve, improve their design process, encourage experimentation and learn from their mistakes.

Starting with a Self-twirling Dress

Christina’s idea for the Magic Bird Dress began with a playful question: could a dress twirl on its own? She sketched and explored multiple ways to add motion to a skirt. In past projects, she faced challenges in achieving movement in multiple axes while maintaining a compact, wearable design that conceals motor mounts. For this project, she mounted Dynamixels to her belt, hidden under a very gathered skirt.

Her first version of the dress functioned well, but watching it in motion, she felt it could be more whimsical. What if the dress didn’t just spin by itself, but appeared to be tugged by a bird?

Building the Magic Bird Dress

For the next iteration, the Magic Bird Dress 1.0, she added the bird and a straight dowel hidden beneath the skirt to create the twirl. The dowel helped to “lift” the bird, but the movement looked stiff. After sharing her progress on her Instagram channel, SheBuildsRobots, her followers suggested using a curved wire instead of a dowel for a more natural lift.

For the Magic Bird Dress 2.0, she bent a coat hanger into a curved shape and sewed a new summer dress around it. To keep the mechanics wearable and hidden, she used SOLIDWORKS for Makers to design precise custom motor mounts. With the mounts ready, she gave the updated dress a try, and the bent coat hanger provided the skirt with a softer, more natural lift, for a much-improved result.

Using Technology to Create Real World Magic

Christina wants people to see how an idea that starts in your imagination, like a bird lifting a dress, can become real through circuits, sewing, and CAD fashion design software. Equally important, she shares the messy parts of creating and prototyping: the experiments that don’t work the first time. By making that process visible, she invites others to try it.

That same spirit shaped her work as Maker-in-Residence at the Chicago Public Library in 2024, where she displayed wearable tech pieces alongside the “circuit skeletons” underneath, allowing visitors to see how they were constructed. She hopes that kids who already love sewing or crafting will look at her projects and think, “I could do this too.”

Fashion Design Tools for Makers at Home

Projects like the Magic Bird Dress show what’s possible when professional software design tools are accessible for personal use. Christina uses SOLIDWORKS for Makers personal use CAD software to model her designs, and it’s available for hobbyists, DIYers, and makers at $48/year. From 3D prints to robotics to sewing and more, it helps makers move from sketch to design to assembly with precision.

Ready to get started? Learn more about SOLIDWORKS for Makers, personal use CAD for $48 USD/year. Learn more about She Builds Robots on its website.

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Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools that let you create, simulate, publish, and manage your data. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use allows more engineers, designers and other technology professionals than ever before to take advantage of 3D in bringing their designs to life.