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August is coming soon and we have tons of great activities planned!   August 1: Youth Maker Night, including Life Casting with Guest Maker Anya August 2: Maker Party at Society for Contemporary Craft with Kevin August 4-8: SKYWORLD recycled materials collaborative creation August 9: Wind Tunnels with Ethan August 10: Back-to-School Lunch Bag Sewing Workshop for ages 8+ August 16: Stop Motion Puppetry Workshop wi

I’ve always said that solving problems is one of the most important parts of being a maker. It is a lot of fun to solve a problem by making something. That is essentially how an inventor thinks. If you are tired of sitting on the ground then why not build a chair? If you your chair isn’t comfortable then you can always sew a cushion. My problem was too many shoes in my closet at home. I could have easily

In February, we began working on a collaborative quilt in MAKESHOP. I wrote about it almost two months ago here. Here’s our update: it’s finished! It has been a true labor of love shared by so many people and an amazing learning experience. I wanted to share some updated photos of the process and getting it hung on the wall. We began by cutting 5×5 inch squares out of scrap fabric. We provided fabric

Every once and a while we decide to totally transform MAKESHOP to meet the needs of a specific activity. For the past couple of months we had been brainstorming some way to play around with ramps and “Rube Goldberg Machines” in our space. Around the end of December we were given a donation of hundreds of cardboard tubes. We took this as a sign that we should come up with some kind of ramp activity soon. O

Over the last couple weeks, MAKESHOP began a quilting project. Everyone was invited to create a 5×5 inch square to add to our collaborative quilt. It has been a fun opportunity to learn all kinds of sewing techniques: from learning to thread a needle to operating a sewing machine. The response has been amazing; it looks like it’s going to be a big quilt! There are so many different ways to embellish each square

A couple of weeks ago we let our visitors explore ramps on a very large scale. We cleared out a large space in MAKESHOP and let adults and kids explore with cardboard tubes, tape and ping pong balls. Photos don’t really do this activity justice. Below are several videos highlighting some of the more interesting creations during our ramp experiment. This was a ramp that I assembled with the help of several kids.