Makeshop™

A creative space to play with ideas, explore materials, and tinker with tools.

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

Sewing Circuits, Part 2

On Tuesday, Pei and I hoped to replicate the success of last Sunday’s workshops. We soon realized, however, that it was a beautiful day outside — after so many unpleasantly hot and sticky ones — and the attendance rate of the museum was therefore lower than we had anticipated, as all of Pittsburgh was busy enjoying the novelty of not…

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Sewing Circuits

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Another Sunday another new project to play around with at the Museum.  No more woodworking in the Shop for now, back to electricity.  Electricity mixed with sewing.  I love it when different projects mix different themes and ideas.  The project for the day was creating fabric bracelets with with light up LED’s. A great group of kids signed up for the first…

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Woodturning Workshops in the MakeShop!

This Saturday, July 23rd, see demonstrations of woodturning by professional woodworker Linda Van Gehuchten AND try the lathe yourself: 1:00 – Woodturning Demo by Linda 1:30, 2:30 and 3:30 – Sign up for a Woodturning Workshop to turn and color your own pen on the lathe. Workshops will last 45 minutes and are open to visitors ages 7 and up only.  Sign…

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WHOA: Robot Band

I’m so excited today because I heard from Matt Steinke, the genius behind the robotic music of Octant, who wants to perform here at the Museum! “Octant can be described as a one-man band featuring mainly acoustic robotic musical instruments that back me up like a player piano as I sing. It is my ongoing solo musical project that incorporates a great deal of…

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a Sunday spent Prototyping is a Sunday spent playing

I love it when there are new toys to play with at the Museum; this Sunday presented me with not one but two.  I already knew about the DIY Pinball created by Felix in the MakeShop; I briefly played with it on Saturday and made it clear that I would spend all day Sunday playing with the thing if time…

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Fifth Period: Shop Class

Every Sunday I find myself venturing into the MakeShop just to see what’s going on.  Lately we’ve been allowing visitors to experiment and build using wood.  Visitors are able to create whatever kind of project they want using our tools and materials. First off, visitors are asked to draw up a blueprint of their project.  Visualizing your project is incredibly…

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Made at MakeShop!

Here are some of my favorite highlights from the first week of MakeShop! Hopefully we’ll be getting more visitor-submitted photos soon to add to our growing collection over at Flickr! A wooden grasshopper. Or was it cricket? Either way, it was awesome! The airplane “Kindness” That is one hefty looking car. Or tank. TV-themed puppet-theater booth! Sky’s beautiful birdhouse Carson…

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Meet the Makers

We’ve been bringing in talented guest makers over the past few months to fulfill our promise for MakeShop to be a place where YOU can “make alongside some of the coolest indie crafters, hackers and inventors in the city”.  In case you missed them, here are some of our recent guests: Jen Primack of Upcycled Designs created headbands, wallets and more…

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