We've already posted one gallery about our Electric Rope. We took the electric dress to Lew and Maria's party in Seattle in August and Burning Man in September.

It was chilly at Lew and Maria's, but they had a big campfire. The real challenge with this outfit is getting a good photo. The firelight was just about perfect...not so bright that it outshone the EL wire, but bright enough that it made Dee's skin glow orange.

Both shots were taken with a tripod and a half-second exposure.

At ShibariCon Lochai from Digital Kinbaku was able to take a couple of good photos of Dee. That version of the outfit also had a woven collar made of yellow EL Wire rope...

Everywhere the reaction was the same, "Where's the blacklight?" Apparently black light rope bondage is old-hat. But when I reach behind Dee's back and flip the switch on the powerpack, the dress blinks off and on, and then the reaction is "Gee! How does that work?"

Since then, we've gotten more than a handful of requests from people who want details. How do we make the rope?

So here's the short version. We use 3.2mm EL Wire from EL Wire Cheap stuffed inside a hollow nylon rope. To make the hollow rope, we take Lehigh 3/16" braided Nylon (part number #ND6100) from Lowe's, and remove the core (two nylon strings and a rolled cellulose padding). Then we stuff the EL wire end-first into the interior of the rope.

It took me about 2 weeks of 4-6 hour days to make 150 feet of the stuff. The dress itself took a day to tie...the challenge is not to make a regular rope dress, which takes me just an hour or so, but to arrange everything to make all the ends come together in the small of the back where Dee hides the batteries and transformer that make the EL wire glow.

This dress runs off of 8 AAA batteries producing 12 volts, along with an 50-125 foot ultra power inverter.

Maria told me I should patent the stuff, but I haven't applied, yet. Under US Patent Office rules, I have until May 29th, 2005, since I first disclosed the invention here on this website on May 30, 2004.

What I really need to do is to invent a way to make more than 10 feet of the stuff in one day.