Maker Faire 2010

Two weekends ago, our family set off on an adventure at the Maker Faire! If you are unfamiliar with Maker Faire, it’s a festival sponsored by Make magazine that showcases artists, crafters, DIY-sters, and other people who do really, really cool things. There are demos, exhibitions, shows, booths and all kinds of fun interactive things to do and see. Here are just a few of those things:

Warning: super photo-heavy post ahead. It might take a while to load.

Just about the first things we saw when we entered were a couple of cupcake cars whizzing by! These have been a fixture at Burning Man and the Maker Faire for a few years now.

And here’s how one looks disassembled:

Zach and Wyatt really wanted to see the mini-boat battle next and I wasn’t so interested in that, so they queued up for the next show and Augie and I hit the Bazaar Bizarre, a hall completely filled with craft vendors. Here were some of my favorites:

The first thing I bought was a two-pack of these felt paper bags beer cozies for Zach from My Imaginary Boyfriend. They just made me laugh, so I had to get them.

I loved these wooden robot cabinets too. The vendor was nice enough to tell me all about them and let me take some pictures, but I didn’t get the name of her business and now I can’t locate it online.

I also really loved these pillows from Eristotle and I talked to the woman who makes them, Erin, for quite a while. She hand cuts the beautiful, detailed animal shapes on the front of each pillow from recycled sweaters. I loved this elephant pillow but it just wasn’t in my budget right now. (Also, I could just see one of the kids smearing chocolate on it within moments of bringing it in the house!)

Sweet Meats was another booth that made me laugh. I love these big cartoon-y hams and steaks. I bought a little ham charm and now I need to get a chain to hang it on.

I also bought this pink robot headband (sorry no picture) from Beyond Wonderland. Her whole shop was full of accessories made from adorable Japanese fabric and I had to stop myself from buying one of each.

When Augie and I came out of crafty-land, the boys were done with their boat battle and waiting in line to go up in this amazing rocket. They waited in line for over an hour and when it was time to climb the scaffolding to enter, Wyatt got half-way up and decided that it was nuts to be that far off the ground so they came right back down.

We were all starting to get hungry at this point, so while Zach and Wyatt waited in line, I zipped off to get some food. There were lots of standard fair food offerings — deep fried stuff, barbecue and more deep fried stuff — but when I walked past this gigundo paella pan, I knew exactly what I was having for lunch.

Augie loved it too!

There were lots of flaming sculptures at the Maker Faire. These were a few of my favorites:

One of the big hits of the day for Wyatt was this big pile of tires that kids could play on. He climbed on them, rolled them, stacked them and knocked them over for at least a half hour.

And when he was done, he was a totally happy, filthy little ragamuffin.

At that point, we decided it was time to hit the big exhibition hall and when we got in there, Wyatt made a bee line for the Lego pit. There was a giant train track and village set up with lots of amazing buildings and structures in it. My favorite was this zoo:

While the boys played with Lego, I went over to the ProvoCraft booth to do their make and takes.

There was a really long line, but I got to see the Cricut Cake in action, silkscreen a tote bag with the Yudu (which I totally want and absolutely can not justify buying), and make a Batman mask for my little Bat-fanatic. You can see how much he loved it.

(He was actually getting really tired at this point.)

We decided this was a good time to head home because, we were all tired and…oh yeah…the Maker Faire was over! On our way out the door we decided we needed to do a little hula hooping. It looks like I’m a really great hula hooper here, but I actually stink. I think I had just let go of the hoop when this photo was taken. Photography is magical.

As we were walking to our car we saw R2-D2 getting loaded into his minivan…er…land speeder so Wyatt stopped to have his picture made with him.

A fine, crafty, making, DIY time was had by all!

And honestly, I’m not even showing you half of the fun things we made, saw and did. We’re already looking forward to next year!

Tagged as: 2020, diy, maker faire, makerfaire