Saturday 15 June 2013

Newcastle Maker Faire

Back at the end of April my work hosted a huge event called Maker Faire. It was a whole weekend celebrating maker culture, creativity, building and hacking and it was AWESOME! I had a pretty busy time working on of the 'BioHacking' stands but I did manage to get a little time to check out what was going on. I also have a wonderful mother who took lots and lots of photos of some of the cool things people were doing.

Some of the event isn't really appropriate to this blog (and you can check out more info on Maker Faire in general here), but I did want to share just a few of the pictures of amazing sewing, knitting, crafting and costumey things I came across.

Crafty things:
There was a stand where you could design your own pattern and a machine would convert it to a bitmap and knit the design for you:



 Trying your hand at Japanese braiding, you can make some really nice bracelets with this technique:


A full size knitting mannequin robot!



And for the geeks among us:
The Rebel Legion were there with some of their costumes, in progress props and costumes and lots of bits and pieces to look at. They were excellent, the quality of their costumes was amazing and they are all very technically accurate, I was so impressed! I thought about wanting to make a Princess Leia costume but I have to say the accurate aspects of the costuming is something that is a little beyond me at this stage but one day... You can check out more form the Rebel Legion here:


The Northern Charity Daleks also made an appearance, they were pretty scary... although one of them is wearing a fez:


We were also making accurately scaled solar system bracelets (these were designed by my friend Emma!):


Oh and this dude:


During the day I was hanging out with one of the DIYBio teams from GenSpace all the way in New York, they brought naturally coloured bacteria that you could paint with, so I was helping people out with that. That's my mum painting at the table with me:


Here are some of the plates people made, mine are the pacman ghost and the rather messy tree. I have to say I was surprised by how well they turned out.



I would definitely recommend heading to a Maker Faire if you get the chance. There are several different mini maker faires across the country - definitely worth a look.

Oh yeah, and there was a robot that painted in pancakes!




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