Light-Up Panniers

When I heard about a Carnevale dance party with the theme of “Viva las Versailles in Venice,” I immediately thought I needed something shiny and bright. I’d always wanted to do some costume with cute, decorative exposed panniers, so I decided on a showgirl type costume with blinged-up panniers.

I looked through AliExpress at rhinestone trims, but that seemed both heavy and not bright enough. Then I got the idea of light-up panniers! Several cosplayer friends have done elaborate lighted costumes, so I looked through their resources, going down a rabbit hole of programmable AdaFruit NeoPixel how-tos on YouTube. I also looked at electroluminescent wire, though I preferred something that would blink because that felt more like the Vegas Strip to me.

After a lot of research, I realized maybe I could do it more simply just by using battery-powered LED strip lights that are easily available on Amazon. Most of the applications for these lights don’t have a lot of tight corners or turns, and I found solderless connectors that could help (since I didn’t want to add soldering to the list of new skills and tools for this project!).

This did require careful planning to map out the direction the LED strip would go along the pannier and where the possible connections would occur.

Unfortunately, the solderless connectors weren’t reliable — in my test, the connection didn’t hold up to any movement, so that wasn’t going to work on a wearable item. So I skipped putting the LED lights down the vertical lines of the panniers, and luckily the lighted strip was flexible enough to bend at the few corners necessary to cross the horizontal lines of the panniers.

To top off the outfit, literally, I found this miniature, battery-powered Las Vegas sign on eBay. I planned to put that on an 18th-century style wig.

I bought a set of cheap black panniers on AliExpress and made a new waistband and sewed pockets on each side to hold the battery packs (I over-engineered those with internal straps for the battery packs that I didn’t end up using). Then I whip-stitched the LED light bands to the panniers.

Because I didn’t like the look of the bare white LED strip, I added a sheer black ruffled trim over the lights. The light still showed through, and the panniers had that decorative look I wanted.

For the party, I wore my custom purple Redthreaded 18th-century corset, black ruffled rhumba pants, purple sparkly tights, purple boots, a ton of rhinestone jewelry, and an 18th-century tall wig made by Kendra. I added a puff of sparkly purple fabric to the Vegas sign and stuck it on top of the wig.