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I have a tendency to over-design things on occasion. Many makers have, I think, experienced this—the impulse to be inventive at the expense of simplicity and ease of use. This is a lesson I’ve learned the hard way several times in the past year as I built and tinkered with a table loom intended to expand our weaving offerings in MAKESHOP. Weaving starts out simply enough. You take string or yarn, arrange it in parall

People seem to love laughing at failure to the point that when something is attempted and hilariously or painfully or bothly does not happen, we call it a FAIL or MAJOR FAIL or EPICFAIL! Why do we do this? Are we embarrassed for the person who tries? Are we scared at how failure can hurt, and laugh as protection? I don’t know, but I think it keeps up from seeing how failure does not have to be the end result or

What do you say when someone says that they want to make an egg-laying robotic chicken? In MAKESHOP we would typically answer that question by first searching through our recycled materials to find just the right thing to make a chicken. Apparently an empty milk carton makes a great chicken shape. The plastic eggs were from a donation of materials brought in by a regular visitor to the Museum. If I had to guess I wou

Attachment is something that we explore all the time in MAKESHOP, from sewing to woodworking to taping things together. We have had a set of building blocks in our space for some time now. These blocks were designed and built by our Museum Exhibits team. They are mostly made out of wood (there is also an aluminum block, a 3D-printed block, an acrylic block and some squishy foam blocks) and can be attached together us

A wedding is a great excuse to make stuff. In the case of my recent matrimony there were a lot of hand made things. My wife and I (along with some other helpers) spent the last year making decorations, invitations and other essential wedding materials. It started off with the creation of our “save the date” announcements. These went through a couple of prototyping stages before we settled on a final produ

Sometimes we are asked to help better explain how different exhibits in the Museum work.  Recently the exhibit piece in question was Wooden Mirror by Daniel Rozin, located in a nook between our Garage exhibit and the Changing Exhibits Gallery. This interactive art piece is a lot of fun – it’s made up of a lot of different parts that work together to create an image of whatever is in front of it. We probab