A few weeks before Maker Faire 2012, we received a large shipment of wool from Granted clothing. We decided to pass out free wool to anyone that wanted to knit something awesome. Scroll down to check out some of the submissions!
A felted table covering:
A hand knit toque:
Finger warmers!
A kayak cozy!
A creative wall hanging:
A poof!
Slippers:
More!
To see even more photos of submissions, check out our yarn party group on flickr.
Written by emilysmith on September 11th, 2012
Emily is a Communication Designer, illustrator, crafter, founder of Maker Foundation and Creative Director of Vancouver Mini Maker Faire. She is an avid textile artist and community organizer with a focus on facilitating collaborative and creative workspaces, teaching workshops, and organizing crafty and creative events. She enjoys foraging for unlikely materials, increasing bicycle safety and visibility, and becoming more self-sufficient while lowering her carbon footprint. Check out her blog at bluemollusc.com
Do you have an awesome DIY quick-fix that made your day? Or something fun you plan to wear to Maker Faire?
Well, I do!
It all started when a dear friend gave me a beautiful pair of suede and leather boots, which came up beautifully over the knee, but when I wore them for longer than five minutes they would scrunch down all pirate-like and looked very sad and frumpy.
I almost gave them away, but then I had a thought. Why not MAKE them stay up. How? By using the age-old technology of men’s sock garters.
Aha!
If you don’t know what sock garters are, just think about how your socks would behave if they did not contain elastic. Not very functional, right? Enter: sock garters.
Invented in the eighteenth century, prior to the widespread use of elastic, sock garters were essential to keep men’s socks from slumping.
Inspired by the very clever and inventive people at Craftzine, I decided to buy some elastic, cut it to fit the top of my calf, stitch it together, and sew a strip of leather inside my boot to hold it up.
It took a total of about 15 minutes to measure, cut and sew.
And… voila:
Perfection! The boots stay up all day! Plus, I feel secretly retro and fabulous because my boots contain the hidden power of sock garters.
Oh look, women are wearing them too!
At a total cost of about $6 (elastic, thread and small leather strips) this is a DIY project worth spreading. Plus, it really helped me get into the maker mindset: problem solving, crafting, and making something function exactly as I want.
So what have you made? Show us! Break out your best DIY threads at Maker Faire on June 23 and 24th and spread that inspiration!
Written by Lena Ross on June 12th, 2012
Lena Ross is a communications officer, writer, volunteer publicist and avid arts and culture enthusiast. When she's not out enjoying live music, inspiring art or locally designed fashion, she spends her spare time thrifting, sewing, promoting the arts, learning photography, and tinkering around on the interwebs.
Got Craft? is Andrea + Robert: a husband and wife event management and wedding coordination team based in London, UK and Vancouver. Providing crafty wares to young, trendsetting individuals, they share a love for handmade indie craft that goes beyond the simple charms of the macaroni art piece.
Got Craft? aims to bring together a community that fosters handmade and DIY culture by supporting like-minded events such as DIY @ Museum of Vancouver, the Austin, TX and Vancouver Premiere of Handmade Nation, Swap-O-Rama-Rama 2009 and 2010, Vancouver Mini Maker Faire and the Sweetie Pie Press 2011 Summer Craft Tour.
When they’re not busy filling their blog with field trips and beloved crafty things, you can find Andrea and Robert selling their handmade goods at local events, or hosting fun and interactive badge-making workshops.
We recently caught up with Andrea to learn more about what Got Craft? is all about, and to find out what they plan to demonstrate at this year’s Maker Faire.
Can you talk a bit about what Got Craft? and Lotus Events is all about?
Lotus events inc. is an event management and wedding coordination company that Robert and I started in 2004 to work on a mix of corporate, independent contracts, and self-produced events such as Got Craft?. Got Craft?, aka myself and Robert, is a husband and wife team that shares a love for handmade indie craft. We are devoted to the Vancouver handmade community by supporting like-minded events such as DIY @ Museum of Vancouver, the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire, the Vancouver Premiere of Handmade Nation, Swap-O-Rama-Rama, and Indie I Do.
As designers ourselves, we wanted to curate a boutique event to showcase some of our favourite handmade artists and provide Vancouver the opportunity to shop for one-of-a kind goods in a casual environment. Attendees are able to meet the makers in person to talk about their handmade goods and creative processes, as well as craft their own take home DIY project.
Aimed at bringing together a community that fosters handmade and DIY Culture, Got Craft? was founded in 2007 and is held twice a year in May and December featuring 50+ handmade designers and an average attendance of 3000+ a year.
What events do you host in the city, when do they happen, and where they are located?
As I mentioned above, we are we have been involved with events such as DIY @ Museum of Vancouver, the Austin, TX premiere of Handmade Nation, and the Sweetie Pie Press 2011 Summer Craft Tour. We are also happy to have had the opportunity to produce events such as the Vancouver Premiere of Handmade Nation, Swap-O-Rama-Rama 2009 and 2010, and the Sweetie Pie Press 2011 Summer Craft Tour. As well, we are super excited to be a part of the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire again this year!
What do you plan on bringing / demonstrating at Vancouver Mini Maker Faire this year?
Got Craft? will be hosting a DIY button-making workshop at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire! We’ll have two sizes of buttons for you to choose from including a large selection of pre-made patterns and custom Got Craft? images, or you can draw your own unique design! We’ll be on-hand to turn those creations into your own custom button!
Who are some of the crafters that came out to Got Craft’s event in early May? Any highlights, or new features?
Last May was one of our busiest Spring shows ever with the swag bag line up starting at 5:15am for a 10:00am door opening. We even had a special guest, Carol, that flew in from Chicago for the second time to attend the show!
We truly believe that it takes a village and we heart each and every one of our vendors! It wouldn’t be fair to us to have to choose our favourites, so you can check out our website for a full list of vendors that joined us for our Spring show.
Any exciting plans for Got Craft? in 2013?
We are always tweaking different aspects of the event or working on ways to make Got Craft? event better. We do have a few big announcements that we are working on, but you are just going to have to wait a bit longer!
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To learn more about Got Craft?, preview their upcoming events on their website or check them out on Facebook.
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Photo credits: [stu-di-o] by jeanie.
Written by Lena Ross on June 8th, 2012
Lena Ross is a communications officer, writer, volunteer publicist and avid arts and culture enthusiast. When she's not out enjoying live music, inspiring art or locally designed fashion, she spends her spare time thrifting, sewing, promoting the arts, learning photography, and tinkering around on the interwebs.
Carlos Castellanos and Steven J Barnes will be showing their project Biopoiesis at this year’s VMMF. They are members of Dprime Research and Carlos is a graduate student at SFU’s School of Interactive Art and Technology. You can see Biopoiesis at the SFU booth, or check it out June 5-10 during an interactive exhibition at Gallery Gachet.
Biopoiesis is an electrical device that grows its own wires. Before I saw it in the gallery I didn’t even know that was possible. Can you tell us more about how it works and where the idea came from?
The project is based on cyberneticist Gordon Pask’s work in the 1950s on electrochemical computational devices [in electrochemical solutions electricity causes a chemical reaction]. In Biopoesis, the solution is held between two plates of glass with wires running into it. When we send electricity into it, the solution grows its own wires, or “threads” as we often call them.
The threads are made of conductive crystal structures and they grow unpredictably, but we can make them react to their surroundings by hooking the wires up to a sensor, like a microphone. So in Biopoiesis, the threads are capturing information about their environment in the way they grow. We’re also recording the growth of the threads with a video camera and using that to alter the electricity going into the solution. This is a classic cybernetic feedback loop, the threads grow based on electricity in the wires, and the electricity in the wires is altered based on how the threads grow.
The project is part of an exhibition called Proof-of-Process where visitors can interact with and change the work on display. What led you to organize a show like that?
Much of interactive or new media art is what they call “process-based”; the work is often characterized by continuous prototyping and testing. Typically the artist creates several pieces that explore a central concept, and then displays them in an exhibit.
We wanted to open that process up. Basically reversing the standard gallery exhibit, where you see the finished product but not all of the work that went into it. This is pretty common in the art world these days, and this is just our particular take on it. When we started DPrime Research we wanted to try and make interesting/weird art-science projects but also bring them and the ideas surrounding them “down to earth”. So there is this tension between our complicated ideas and theories and this sort of community-based, open-sourcing of the work, where people can come and change the art without knowing all the theory behind it. I think having that unresolved tension can be good.
I’ve often heard members of local makerspaces talk about how diverse the maker community is, and the School of Interactive Arts and Technology is an interdisciplinary department. Has working with people from different backgrounds had an impact on your art?
I think it has but probably not in the way I may have imagined. I should say that my background is originally in music, I never really wanted to be an “artist” in the stereotypical sense. And I have always been interested in technology. Being at SIAT is probably what got me interested in alternative modes of computation like Biopoiesis. It’s like I said to myself, “everyone else is coding all the time, let me try and NOT do that”.
What’s your favorite part of the project so far?
It’s open-endedness. All of the projects in Proof-of-Process can be configured in so many different ways. We are really looking forward to others coming in with their ideas. I’m sure they will come up with things we never would have thought of.
Written by adpmilne on June 6th, 2012
Andrew Milne is a graduate student at SFU's School of Interactive Arts and Technology. He's currently doing a fellowship at Science World to help develop maker programs at the museum. He is a member of the Vancouver Hack Space, where he makes 3D printers and starts long conversations about education. You can find him at the VHS booth teaching soldering and Arduino workshops.
Limor Fried, or Ladyada as she’s better known in geekspeak, is a prolific maker, engineer, kit maker, entrepreneur, MAKE advisory board member and open source hardware pioneer.
In an exciting blessing for makers and female engineers, Fried graced the April cover of WIRED magazine: a publication that’s been around for 18 years. This is the first time a female engineer has ever been featured on the cover.
MAKE Magazine called it a milestone for makers, for women, for engineers, and anyone who makes things for a living.
Fried was also interviewed this year on CBC’s Spark by host Nora Young. She defines what a Maker is, and touches on some amazing projects she’s got her eye on for the future.
“A maker is the new hobbiest. It’s someone who likes to build stuff with their hands and with tools,” Fried says. “I work a lot with electronics makers, people who really like to build electronics, both from scratch, and to take stuff off the shelf and modify and manipulate it to make it do cool and awesome stuff.”
Cool and awesome indeed. Though she’s one of the most talented, hard-working and intelligent voices in the maker community, one of the best things about Ladyada is that she’s female, and she embraces it.
As she explains to CBC:
“I just love glam. I wanna go out there and be crazy and blinky and awesome and have a good time.”
Yes!
After first talking about the importance of open source software and hardware (that’s how she learned her stuff), Fried talks about her own clothing line using wearable computing. This is clothing with embedded coloured lights that allows the wearer to feature a movie, favourite team colours, or other more elegant displays using layers of softly lighted fabric to create a stunning visual display.
And what if she gets lost?
Fried also has an idea for a handbag that would harness GPS powers to tell the wearer which direction to walk in.
Want.
If you’re still not convinced that Ladyada is awesome, take a gander at her website Ladyada.net. The site receives about 3000 unique visitors each day, and logs an average of 20G of traffic per day. After taking a peek around her site, it’s easy to see why.
There’s a veritable feast of information on how to make/deconstruct/hack/recreate different electronic items, all with her trademark upbeat, step-by-step instructions.
Two of my favourite projects are the Minty Boost: a portable USB charger, and the x0xb0x: a digital synthesizer.
The Minty Boost is a small-yet-powerful USB charger for your mp3 player, camera, cell phone, and pretty much any other gadget that plugs into a USB port to charge. And it all fits neatly into an Altoids tin.
You can order the kit from Adafruit Industries, Fried’s webshop. With a few basic souldering skills and your own discarded tin, you can make your very own Minty Boost for about 20 bucks.
And once you’re done, just sit back, relax, and watch your electronics come to life!
The x0xb0x is substantially more complicated.
x0xb0x (pronounced “zocks box”) is a full reproduction of the original Roland synthesizer with a fully functional sequencer. The sequencer can be programmed just like the original, and can be used to control other synthesizers using one of its various output formats.
The x0xb0x boasts 128 banks of track memory and 64 banks of pattern memory, which are stored in onboard EEPROM.
And, of course, it’s got no less than 40 LEDs.
“Crazy and blinky and awesome!”
In Fried’s words:
“Electronics is now the new palatte. It’s the new way for us to modify, hack, explore… It’s great for everyone to know how to fix the things around them, or upgrade the things around them… [because] everything that you fix is another thing that isn’t being thrown away.”
Amen sister. Now how do I join your official fan club?
Photo credits:
Wired Cover — Courtesy of blog.makezine.com
Fried with x0xb0x — Courtesy of wired.com
Minty Boost and x0xb0x — Courtesy of ladyada.net
Written by Lena Ross on May 22nd, 2012
Lena Ross is a communications officer, writer, volunteer publicist and avid arts and culture enthusiast. When she's not out enjoying live music, inspiring art or locally designed fashion, she spends her spare time thrifting, sewing, promoting the arts, learning photography, and tinkering around on the interwebs.
Means of Production Garden or MOPARRC (Means Of Production Artist Raw Resource Collective) is a native plant garden and a terraced fruit orchard “creative commons” garden that cultivates materials for artists and art projects. The project started in 2002 with Oliver Kelhammer as lead artist, working with the Vancouver Parks Board and Community Arts Council of Vancouver funding the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA) as a partner. The garden has provided artists with materials for basket weaving for the Urban Weaver Project, materials for natural dyeing, as well as wooden horned instruments, in the case of the Legion of Flying Monkeys. The garden is located at the corner of St. Catherines Street and East 6th Avenue. Located in central Vancouver, in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
Artist Projects from Garden Materials:
The Legion of Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestra
The Urban Weaver Project
Natural Dye Experiments, Blue Mollusc
Written by emilysmith on April 23rd, 2012
Emily is a Communication Designer, illustrator, crafter, founder of Maker Foundation and Creative Director of Vancouver Mini Maker Faire. She is an avid textile artist and community organizer with a focus on facilitating collaborative and creative workspaces, teaching workshops, and organizing crafty and creative events. She enjoys foraging for unlikely materials, increasing bicycle safety and visibility, and becoming more self-sufficient while lowering her carbon footprint. Check out her blog at bluemollusc.com
