Maker Faire Austin

YES!  We will have lots and lots of legos.  Whew!  You were worried about that, weren’t you.

Texas Brick Railroad will have lots of amazing creations on display which  combine their love for legos and model railroads, and a play area, too.  

Learn how to make custom LEGO based minifigures with Jared Burks of fineclonier.com .  A huge amount of his customized LEGO minifigs will also be on display.  

And come play with legos, programming, and robotics with LegoWeDo and Scratch: Playful Robotics.  

We’re so thrilled to announce that New Bohemia, the famous and funky SoCo vintage clothing store, is supporting our Faire at the Special Event sponsorship level!    

This is homegrown Austin business that supports it’s community and really gives back… we love you New Bohemia!

And they’re giving us much more than just financial backing… they’ll also be donating tons of clothes and fabric to our amazing Mega Swap and Chop that will be taking place in one hefty corner of our Faire.  In the second of our Meet the Makers series we are doing on Sundays at the Austin Children’s Museum, Bernadette Noll, our Swap coordinator, offered up a taste of the huge amount of crafts and projects that are going to be available.  These are cool denim crowns (denim donated by New Bohemia) that kids had a blast making and customizing.

By Bernadette Noll (of Future Craft Collective and Slow Family Living), AMMF core crafter lead.

With just over a month until the 2nd annual Austin Mini Maker Faire, we are gearing up big time to get everything in order.  This year I am in charge of the Mega Clothes Swap and I am super excited about it!  Since my initial Maker Faire exposure over 5 years ago I have been running a version of the clothes swap at my kids’ school at Zilker elementary along with many able and willing volunteers.  If you’ve been you know how amazing it is.  And for the Maker Faire swap, we’re taking the clothes swap to a whole ‘nuther level.

While we will still be taking clothes of all varieties, and we will still be encouraging people to find garments they like, the Maker Faire swap will also be focusing on textile crafts that will utilize the giant piles of garments that accumulate.

We will need LOTS of VOLUNTEERS to help the swap run smoothly and remember, when you volunteer as swap runner, you get first dibs on the garments!  Lucky.

If you have a PROJECT you’d like to do, we are definitely looking for more ideas to make things with the mountains of garments that will surely come our way.

We will have all sorts of projects, some of which are still to be decided and others which are already in the preparation stages.  Some of the amazing crafts going on will be t-shirt bags, fabric collage, yarn from t-shirts, a community weaving project, screen-printing, appliques, crowns, and so much more!

If you’re coming to the Faire, be sure to bring your CLEAN clothes to add to the piles.  We are especially seeking T-SHIRTS and especially in lots of great colors.  Of course for the bags, we’ll use them all, but for the yarn, we’d love colors.

We are also seeking 100% WOOL garments in all stages of disrepair.  If you can get those to me ahead of time, email me at bernadettenoll at gmail dot com and we’ll discuss a mass pick-up.

If you want to bring the wool on the day of, we would love for you to felt them up in a hot, high agitation wash cycle.

But don’t let this list limit your selections.  This is a swap and we welcome all your cast-off clothing items.  As always, our motto is…

BRING WHAT YOU CAN.  TAKE WHAT YOU NEED…

And….

MAKE COOL STUFF!!!

P.S. We are also seeking sponsors for our amazing Swap so if you know of a company that would be a good match, please send them my way…. bernadettenoll at gmail dot com.

Austin Mini Maker Faire will be bringing Makers out to the Austin Children’s Museum every Sunday in April from 1-3 pm.  First up… Make your own soap with Feto Soap!