Art in Bloom
Art in Bloom is an event held by the Carnegie Museum of Art each year, when local people and organizations create floral arrangements inspired by and based on artwork at the museum. This year, Children’s Museum created an arrangement for the event. Ours was to be a companion piece for “Drain” by Robert Gober, a hand-crafted pewter drain set into the back wall of a…
Textile Design Crash Course
Lea and I, both Teaching Artists, ran Textile Design Crash Courses for two different groups of visiting Winchester Thurston high school students on special day-long field trips, one on May 20th and another on May 21st. Asked to come up with a 4.5 hour workshop of our choosing, we jumped at the chance to work with older kids in a…
Typeface Design Drop-in Workshop
This was originally posted without the link to the font! Oops! Here’s the updated post! On two different recent Saturday afternoons we invited visitors to help us create a typeface — or nice looking collection of letters, numbers and symbols, like a comma or question mark — that we are going to turn into a font, or tool we can use…
Thinking About Typeface Design for Kids
Are you feeling inspired by our typeface design project? Do you want to work on your design skills at home? Here are some ideas for what to look for, what to notice and how to begin considering typography and typeface design in your everyday life.
MAKESHOP Panoramas
Last April, MAKESHOP was photographed by a robot. A robot named GigaPan, which uses motors and gears to move the camera and press the shutter button. After all these zoomed-in, super-detailed photos are taken, a special program “stitches” them together so it looks like one long photo that is bigger, longer and more detailed than a regular camera is able to see at…
3D Modeling
If you’re a frequent visitor to our space or this blog, you may know that we have a MakerBot Replicator. We pulled it out recently for Youth Maker Night, an event for older children and young teens. We figured it would be a fun thing to check out while people were snacking in between working on projects. Unfortunately, some of the printer settings were accidentally reset before the event…
Mermaid Puppet
When 4-year-old Reese came in, she was sure she wanted to make something… she just wasn’t sure what. After seeing a prototype marionette our Teaching Artist Lea had made, she was immediately inspired. “My favorite princess is Ariel. I’m going to make a mermaid puppet,” she declared, “And when I get home I’m going to put on a puppet show…
“Warmth” Workshops
Our January programmatic theme of “warmth” meant return visits by two great Guest Makers, Theresa Baughman and Deren Guler. Check out some photos from their workshops! “Warm Fuzzies” with Theresa Baughman Theresa, one of our former MAKESHOP interns, set up our workshop area with everything kids needed to sew a pillow that can be warmed up in the microwave. There wasn’t…
Inside the Sewing Machine
Over the winter holidays, we did a lot of take-apart here at the museum. Tons of old audio equipment, toys, printers… and a sewing machine! I had a great team of four kids helping me get that stubborn front off. It really didn’t want to go! We recently replaced this machine with a newer one, and thought we’d keep the old…
Looming Danger
Sure, we’ve made some beautiful things here, but not every weaving experiment goes well. Sometimes… well, sometimes this happens. If our strings aren’t strong enough, they’re liable to break, shred or be otherwise completely messed up. Here are some other problems, surprises, and discoveries: DENSITY Sometimes you can really tell who was doing the weaving! Every visitor who works on…