Light Up Silk Flower Corsage

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Prep LED Flower

The Silk Flower LED is an RGB LED stuck through the middle of a decorative flower. As it comes, it is not quite ready to be sewn into a project. We'll be doing some prep work by soldering resistors to the three LED wires and creating sewable loops. It will end up looking something like this:

This process will be the same for both the pre-made silk flower and a bare RGB LED.

Identify LED Legs

Before we do any soldering, we'll have to keep track of which legs on the LED go to which color in the LED. This is a common cathode LED, meaning all 3 LEDs inside share one ground wire. Find wire 2 (the longest wire) - this is the ground wire. Gently bend the wires away from each other so they are easier to access when soldering.

To help us keep track of the wires and insulate them from accidentally touching when we sew our circuit, we'll be using different colors of heat shrink tube. Make sure to choose a heat shrink tube that will fit easily over the resistors.

If you don't have heat shrink, you can also wrap electrical tape tightly around the wires or paint them with white liquid electrical tape and color with permanent markers after soldering.

Soldering

Cut a small piece of heat shrink that will cover all but the last 1/4" of wire and slip it over the GROUND wire. Use a pair of needle nose pliers to curl the end of the wire into a loop. Double check that the loop is big enough for your needle and thread, then solder closed.

Now we have an easy to sew loop for attaching the wire to our conductive thread. Finish the process by setting the heat shrink - use a heat gun or hold the side of the soldering iron close to (but not touching) the tube until it shrinks around the wire.

We'll repeat the process with the other three LED legs, but this time we'll attach a current limiting resistor. Feel free to clip the LED legs a little shorter at this point since the resistor will add some additional length.

Wrap one wire of the resistor around a leg of the LED. Solder the two wires together.

Then cover both the wire and resistor with a length of heat shrink. Bend the remaining wire on the resistor into a loop and solder closed. Finish by setting the heat shrink. We used heat shrink colors that match the LED - red, green, and blue.