If you live in Austin …
… you might want to check out some Maker Faire related items. The Craft blog is posting madly about the upcoming event (weekend of October 18th, I believe), and I do believe some of it looks rather entertaining. At last year’s Maker Faire I spent most of the day I went looking at robots. Turns out Austin has a big community of robot afficionados doing everything from spin art to sand drawing to playing video games via trampoline. Pretty darn awesome. But I missed other things like weaving and spinning demonstrations, and the Swap-O-Rama-Rama. And Evil Mad Scientist’s CandyFab machine (though I smelled it). And some other stuff. There was really too much to do for one day. (That’s my hands at the 2007 Maker Faire with my brand-new tiny transistor making noise with graphite there on the right. And you can see the Robo Spin Art that went into my A Piacere piece.)
This year I am going to look more into the crafty element, vis-a-vis:
- Bazaar Bizaare is making an appearance in 2008. I’ve heard many things about these, but have never been to one.
- The Craftzine bloggers made a Google map of crafty businesses in Austin. Except for the ones in Cedar Park (a bit of a drive for me) I’ve been to most of these. I’m addicted to craft stores. I can’t even really admit to my visit to one the other day.
- An interview with Lisa Stevens of Austin’s Greater Austin Garbage Arts. This year’s Swap-O-Rama-Rama will be headed up by Stevens and her GAGA partner Molly Whitten.
I’d like to note that the Garbage Arts establishment is actually right next door to a very lovely local coffee roaster and shop called Fair Bean that you can find me at around 8:30 many mornings. I’m a coffee addict, and they do know their coffee.
Since I’m just going to repost Craft today, you should also not miss the New York Times article on Faythe Levine, creator of the Handmade Nation documentary. Not often the craft peeps get love from the big news outlets, so I like to pass on the links.
