Maker Faire Roundup

Thanks to Ponoko Laser cutting service I won a free ticket to Maker Faire 2009! Ponoko has been operating exclusively out of New Zealand until very recently; they now have a stateside office in San Francisco where you can place orders for custom laser cutting done on a wide variety of materials. Maker Faire is the worlds largest DIY festival, in its fourth year now.

Quite a lot of the stars of the fabbing world were in attendance, and Saturday I got to meet the guys from Ponoko as well as the guys from Candy Fab the open source sugar fabbing project. Our first stop ended up being the felting Parlour provided by Made by Moxie felt works, and attended to quite wonderfully by Brooklyn. My oldest Daughter Appolonia drove us down and it was neat to have family time, I think most people at the Faire were enjoying the same. Sitting on the plush green velvet couches also gave us a sideline view of the action at the MAKE craft demonstrations, a key part of kicking off the Maker Faire experience for the two of us since we recently started crocheting like mad.

Right away I fell in love with needle felting. Its a pretty new craft actually, since the specially barbed needles were invented in 1983 to aid the industrial manufacture of felt. There are also all sorts of crazy bright intense colors of wool to choose from with the modern dyes, its pretty fun to mix with natural plant dyes and create densely felted little whimsical creatures quickly with the needles, a foam support and really just a little bit of animal fiber or more specifically sheeps wool roving.

Initially I was distracted by looking for my very good friend artist Jef Stott. He was presenting his masters thesis project in computer music "Subtlebodies", and even though he was right next to the door it took me the better part of the morning to actually locate him, here is my youtube of his project installation.

A lot of the weekend was spent in exposition hall, partially because Jef was there presenting and also because of the many exhibits inside detailing ideas and new technologies. The crowd was amazing, quite a lot of people and overall very well behaved considering the discomfort of heavily populated passageways and warm sunny outdoor temperatures creating warm inside spaces filled with bodies. Of course we had to take regular trips to the Maker Shed to see all of their kits and books and try and agonize over what to buy. Right away we knew that we would be diving into the Bizarre Bazaar in order to find the Made by Moxie booth and get a sampler kit of roving and some needles for felting. I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the incredibly varied crafted good in the building even if it was a little frustrating for awhile to move around.

Bwteen the two days we managed to spend enough time in the Make Play Day area to finish the "How to: Lighting an LED" project. This was an amazing aspect of the faire, actually falling into play and make space, actually getting totally absorbed in creativity. It was also really neat intergenerational time, lots of intense silent moments passing the hot glue gun back and forth between strangers. After hot gluing two clothespins together we made simple switches with wire that allowed the light to go on and off. It was remedial electronics project time and it made me really happy to have it with my oldest daughter.

Some of the other DIY areas included the swaparamarama sewing and embellishing area for garment construction, and an area showing how to turn toys into jewelry that I hardly even saw, however later I watched some cool youtubes of people making stuff there.

Steampunk was well represented, and my pals at Neverwas Haul were swamped with vistors pretty much non stop over by the giant mousetrap game. In the crowd I heard someone say that this was the "civilized Burningman", and considering all of the art installations and overall the visual poetry of the vent I think thats pretty accurate. Of all of the existing festival "faires" I think Maker Faire best represents the craft ethic that fueled the rise of the "Faire" craft festival movement in the early sixties.

Our first thoughts were about who we wanted to bring with us next year, and hotel! definitely I want to stay adjacent where there is also shuttle service so that it is possible to take in more of the action. I really felt like I barely got oriented before it was over. An example is that it wasnt until the end of the second day that we discovered a huge room full of homemade rockets, and outside the really cool solar arc exhibit (wish I had a link there). I did manage to get a card from the gridbeamers, who have created an amazing building system not unlike an adult sized erector set. Its possible to build everything from simple furniture to complex vehicles with this re-usable building system which seems to be based on Open Source principles of sharing and collaborative design. Along with the visual interest of the cyclicide human powered carnival style rides there were several areas with special installations. The miniaturized worl of the remote controlled tanks was bustling with attentive activity pretty much non stop. There was also a neat installation from the linedry.com people, with a really cute little upcycled baby madras shirt as a clothespin holder (with the sleeves and bottom sewed shut). I actually dry all of my clothes on hangers in my house on special poles that I installed for the task, I used to line dry however I have some allergies and drying inside means we can also use the woodstove heat twive in the winter and save the fabrics from sun in the summer. I also live in Southern Humboldt where you will eventually loose trying to predict the weather with your laundry out.

The landscape was visually really amazing and auditorily it was very full as well. There were stations seemingly everywhere for people to jam on, all sorts of dutycycled electronics living again as fun instruments for spontaneous collaboration. There was also an amazing range of food smells, on Saturday we had the spectacular Paella, and on Sunday we discovered the really really great Dim Sum (organic!) late in the day. We were lucky to get the last mustard Dim sum and inspired by the cilantro shrimp ones enough to go back for more. I also heard from my pal Danese that the wood fired oven Pizza was great festival food raising the bar also.

On Sunday I had a meetup with my virtual community which is also a teahouse online. We met at Danese's Open Source Hardware Panel since I knew I didnt want to miss that panel or the kits panel following it. I ended up having coffee outside with Jef during part of the second panel however Appolonia was there taking careful notes for her Americorp Vista youth program at Ink People in Eureka. There were a lot of inspiring people on this panel, notably the arduino kit people including the Lilypad lady. For both of us the star of the panel was the young teenage inventor of the "Elemento" chemsitry card game. Ansul Shamar with his twinkling eyes and excited air ignited the conversation about the use of games in the learning process, and his own experience of creating alchemistempire.com.

Next year we plan on making this our focused on festival family event for the year. We are already planning on saving up to stay locally at a Hotel so we can take more in, as well as bringing the rest of our family along to enjoy the fun. It was like a giant festival for mad scientists and that means a lot of my family is interested in it now.