Shaping lace: Machine embroidered metamaterials.

The ability to easily create embroidered lace textile objects that can be manipulated in structured ways, i.e., metamaterials, could enable a variety of applications from interactive tactile graphics to physical therapy devices. However, while machine embroidery has been used to create sensors and digitally enhanced fabrics, its use for creating metamaterials is an understudied area. This article reviews recent advances in metamaterial textiles and conducts a design space exploration of metamaterial freestanding lace embroidery. We demonstrate that freestanding lace embroidery can be used to create out-of-plane kirigami and auxetic effects. We provide examples of applications of these effects to create a variety of prototypes and demonstrations.